Language Philosophy & Legal Interpretation

Randy Barnett over at The Volokh Conspiracy references Lawrence Solum, a law professor at University of Illinois College of Law, who wrote a lengthy post on constitutional interpretation called "Semantic and Normative Originalism: Comments on Brian Leiter’s “Justifying Originalism.”

I first became interested in linguistics via language philosophy and speech act theory, so I always have a soft spot for debates that involve theories of meaning, as this legal one does (Solum actually references Grice, hehe). It’s a long and complicate post involving legal issues I have no special knowledge of, but I’m interested in teasing apart the Grice reference to see if it has legs, or if it’s yet another example of naïve linguistics gone wrong.