WSZYSCY JESTEŚMY TŁUMACZAMI: WYKŁADNIA KONSTYTUCYJNA JAKO TŁUMACZENIE.

European courts and legal scholars are accustomed to construing codes that have been in place for long periods of time. In the U.S., most laws are recent enough that the meanings of their words have not changed very much over time. This, however, is not true of the Constitution, which was adopted in the late 18th century. There are debates in the U.S. about how faithful current interpreters of the Constitution should be to the original meaning of the Constitution’s language, and over what it means to be faithful to the original meaning of the Constitution’s language. Should we care about what the original drafters had in mind, or about how the public that voted on the Constitution understood the language? Scholars and judges have turned to old dictionaries for help. Now, however, corpus linguistics has entered the scene, including a new corpus of general 18th century English. In this paper, I will suggest that scholars and judges interested in the meanings of the words as then understood should put themselves in the position of lexicographers writing a bilingual dictionary that translates the terms from a foreign languageinto contemporary English. Such a stance will bring out the many difficult problems in using a corpus as a means of making legal decisions today.Inaczej niż europejskie, większość amerykańskich regulacji prawnych została stworzona na tyle niedawno, że terminologia użyta w tekstach prawodawczych nie zdążyła jeszcze zmienić swojego znaczenia. Ta reguła nie tyczy się jednak konstytucji Stanów Zjednoczonych, która została sformułowana w końcu XVIII w. W Stanach Zjednoczonych trwają obecnie dyskusje nad tym, czy właściwie interpretuje się konstytucję oraz jak jej współczesne rozumienie ma się do jej pierwotnego znaczenia. Czy powinniśmy skupiać się na pierwotnym znaczeniu terminów użytych przez autorów konstytucji czy na tym jak te terminy są rozumiane przez ogół współczesnego społeczeństwa, który głosował za przyjęciem konstytucji? Obecnie, w czasach popularności językoznawstwa korpusowego i po stworzeniu rozległego korpusu XVII wiecznej angielszczyzny znalezienie odpowiedzi na to pytanie może być możliwe

Pernicious Ambiguity in Contracts and Statutes

This Article explores pernicious ambiguity, an interpretive problem that is not adequately acknowledged by the legal system. Pernicious ambiguity occurs when the various actors involved in a dispute all believe a text to be clear, but assign different meanings to it. Depending upon how the legal system handles this situation, a case with pernicious ambiguity can easily become a crapshoot. If the judge does not take heed of the competing interpretations as reflecting a lack of clarity, and if that judge happens to understand the document in a way helpful to a particular party, that party wins. Because the document is not seen as ambiguous, the document is declared clear. In reality, however, the document is even less clear than are ambiguous documents. The competing interpretations reflect a complete communicative breakdown. If language worked so poorly generally, it would not be possible to have a language-driven rule of law at all. The problem, perhaps ironically, is that the concept of ambiguity is itself perniciously ambiguous. People do not always use the term in the same way, and the differences often appear to go unnoticed. While all agree that ambiguity occurs when language is reasonably susceptible to different interpretations, people seem to differ with respect to whether those interpretations have to be available to a single person, or whether ambiguity occurs when different speakers of the language do not understand a particular passage the same way. Often, courts even ignore disagreement among judges as irrelevant to whether a document is clear on its face. This Article will show how these different notions of ambiguity emerge, and offer some explanations based on advances in linguistics, cognitive psychology, and the philosophy of language. Examples are taken from cases concerning the interpretation of statutes, contracts, and insurance policies

Convicting the Innocent beyond a Reasonable Doubt: Some Lessons about Jury Instructions from the Sheppard Case

Indeed, it is difficult to prove one\u27s innocence, and the legal system purports not to require defendants in criminal cases to do so. The shift in the burden of proof happened for a number of reasons. In this article, I will discuss another factor that I believe pervades the criminal justice system: jury instructions that shift the burden from the government to the defendant. Part II of this article establishes three criteria for good criminal jury instructions. They are fidelity to the law, comprehensibility, and consistency with the presumption of innocence. It then discusses the presumption of innocence, burden of proof and circumstantial evidence instructions used at the time of the first Sheppard trial in light of those criteria. None of them passes muster. While jury instructions in Ohio and elsewhere have made some progress since then, the system can still be improved in ways that are quite obvious. Part III discusses some of the empirical research on burden of proof instructions, and relates it to both the jury instructions on which Dr. Sheppard was convicted, and contemporary instructions. Part IV is a brief conclusion calling for the criminal justice system to take seriously the need to revise jury instructions to convey the messages they are supposed to convey in language that people can understand. It has been almost fifty years since Dr. Sheppard was convicted. The system has made some progress in that time, but not nearly enough