Mark Liberman, blogging on legal interpretation in 'a case where "some
of the best lawyers in the world, and the Delaware courts, couldn't
work out the meaning of what they had written"':
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2045
The judge in the case wrote: "under the forthright negotiator
principle, the subjective understanding of one party to a contract may
bind the other party when the other party knows or has reason to know
of that understanding."
Liberman comments: '[this] "forthright negotiator principle" ... is
certainly something that normal humans presuppose in their
communicative exchanges. It's part of why "theory of mind" reasoning
is hard."
It seems to me that there may be interesting things to say about this
(and that people on this list are likely to be able to say them). The
comments on the blog so far have mostly focussed instead on why (and
whether) judges write better than other lawyers.
By the way, there have been several interesting posts about legal
interpretation in the last couple of years on Language Log, most or
all of which are essentially case studies in applied pragmatics.
Nick
(trying to practise what I preach)
Nicholas Allott
Postdoctoral research fellow
CSMN
University of Oslo
n.e.allott@csmn.uio.no
nicholas.allott@gmail.com
Received on Thu Jan 14 14:20:42 2010
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