Ambiguity

The Texas Supreme Court Doesn’t Know from Commas

Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn that mentioned Sullivan v. Abraham, a 2016 opinion of the Texas Supreme Court (PDF here). The LinkedIn post mentions that the opinion involved a serial comma, so of course I had to check it out. Unfortunately, this opinion offers another example of a court that’s inept at textual interpretation. As such, it’s worth … Read More

You Too Can Join the PreAmbiguity Department!

Remember the 2002 movie Minority Report? Here’s how Wikipedia describes the premise: In April 2054 Washington, DC’s prototype “PreCrime” police department prevents murders, via three clairvoyant humans (“Precogs”) attached to a computer, who have an innate ability to “previsualize” crimes of extreme emotion and violence, before the offending suspect even begins the fatal deed. Well, you can participate in an … Read More

Hey, Another Fight Over “And”: Spanski Enterprises, Inc. v. Telewizja Polska S.A.

What I call “ambiguity of the part versus the whole”—ambiguity involving whether it’s a single member of a group of two or more that’s being referred to, or the entire group—is annoyingly complicated. Whenever I talk about it, I have to remind myself, and those I’m addressing, that we have no choice but to wrestle with this complexity because people … Read More

A Broader Understanding of “Thinking Like a Linguist”

I noted with interest this item by Howard Bashman about a program at the 2019 Appellate Judges Education Institute (AJEI) Summit entitled “Thinking Like a Linguist.” As Howard describes it, “the program offered an introduction to the field of linguistics and its past and potential future uses in resolving legal disputes.” But it was actually about a narrower topic—corpus linguistics, … Read More

More Syntactic Ambiguity and Comma Confusion: Glasser v. Hilton Grand Vacations Co., LLC

In this November 2019 post I wrote about Princeton Excess & Surplus Lines Insurance Co. v. Hub City Enterprises, Inc., a court opinion from the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida in which a judge demonstrated catastrophic misunderstanding of how the English language works. In an update to that post earlier this month, I noted that in … Read More

Some Serious Comma Confusion Out of Florida

[Updated 1 March 2020: On 4 February 2020 the insurer filed its brief. Go here for a copy. Here’s what they said about this post: With the law and rules of grammar against them, the insureds scour the Internet in search of support for their efforts to transform a stylistic choice into an ambiguity. The insureds settle on a blogger—one … Read More