Category Archives: Language
Statutes as lemons (critique of Kavanaugh, 2016)
We have just finished reading Brett Kavanaugh’s highly original essay “Fixing Statutory Interpretation” in the Harvard Law Review, vol. 129 (2016), pp. 2118-2163. (Kavanaugh, who we shall now refer to as “K-1”, is a federal appellate judge on the D.C. … Continue reading
When to use the passive voice
As faculty editor of the UCF Undergraduate Journal, we are constantly on “passive voice search & destroy missions” when we edit manuscripts: hunting for awkward sentences written in the passive voice and converting them into simple and straightforward active voice … Continue reading
Visualization of world’s most spoken languages
Bud Light for President?
Cheers! This lighthearted beer ad actually teaches an important lesson regarding statutory and constitutional interpretation–a fundamental lesson often lost on naive “originalists” or textualist legal scholars: a word or term of art like “party” (or “speech,” “arms,” “natural born,” etc.) … Continue reading
Is Senator Cruz a “natural born citizen”?
(P1) Major premise: Article II of the U.S. Constitution categorically states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the office of President” (emphasis added). This proposition is thus our “major premise” or general principle of … Continue reading
Mapping the writers and the works of “the lost generation”
Credit: Martin Varnic (via kottke).
Spanish language map of the Americas
Props to Homesanto (via reddit) for the pointer.