How Linguistic Interpretation Can Profoundly Shape Court Decisions

Dr. Erica Brozovsky of the PBS series Otherwords explained how a judicial interpretation of linguistics can profoundly affect a court decision. Such interpretations include grammatical issues, such as the Oxford comma, as well as dictionary definitions and search terms.

In a courtroom, these semantic disagreements can have life or death consequences. How a single word or punctuation mark is interpreted can mean the difference between freedom or life in prison.

Brozovsky also explores the concept of textualism, a widely used theory that focuses on the plain meaning of a legal text, without considering context, intention, or the problem it initially sought to remedy.

According to Textualism, a judge should never consider any information outside the literal wording of a statute. Even if you happen to know exactly what the legislators had in mind when they wrote a bill, if they didn’t express it clearly, it doesn’t matter. In this philosophy, the law is the words on the page, nothing more, nothing less.

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