Brian Slocum (law professor)

Last updated

Brian G. Slocum is an American author and professor of law with recognized expertise in jurisprudence, statutory interpretation, legal linguistics, and administrative law. [1] Professor Brian Bix of the University of Minnesota described him as 'one of the most important scholars working at the intersection of legal interpretation and the philosophy of language'. [2] Professor Slocum's scholarship has examined and criticized the 'ordinary meaning doctrine' and how it has been used by courts to interpret language. He has won numerous awards and his publications are printed in other languages, including Chinese. [3]

Contents

Education

Slocum has earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from Pacific Union College, a juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School, and an master's degree and Ph.D. in linguistics from UC Davis.

Career

Brian G. Slocum is the Stearns Weaver Miller Professor at Florida State University College of Law, where he teaches language and legal interpretation. Previously, he was a law professor and associate dean for scholarship at the University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law. He has also been a visiting professor at UC Davis School of Law, UC Berkeley Law School, and Stanford Law School.

Current Interests

Slocum states that he is working in the field of experimental jurisprudence, doing empirical research on how ordinary people understand the language of rules. His latest paper questions legal perspectives that claim normative values are irrelevant in determining statutory linguistic meaning. [4]

Publications

Books

Professor Slocum has written three books:

Articles

He has also published articles in many notable law journals, including:

His most-cited papers are:

  1. The Immigration Rule of Lenity and Chevron Deference (Georgetown Immigration Law Journal 17, 515, 2002) [5]
  2. The Importance of Being Ambiguous (Maryland Law Review 69, 791, 2009) [6]
  3. Canons, the Plenary Power Doctrine, and Immigration Law (Florida State University Law Review 34, 363, 2006) [7]
  4. The Meaning of Sex: Dynamic Words, Novel Applications, and Original Public Meaning (Michigan Law Review, 119, 2020) [8]
  5. Statutory Interpretation from the outside (Columbia Law Review 122, 213, 2022) [9]
  6. Ordinary meaning and corpus linguistics (Brigham Young University Law Review 2017, 1417, 2017) [10]
  7. RICO and the Legislative Supremacy Approach to Federal Criminal Lawmaking (Loyola University of Chicago Law Journal 31, 639, 1999) [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Law Institute</span> American legal advocacy group

The American Law Institute (ALI) is a research and advocacy group of judges, lawyers, and legal scholars established in 1923 to promote the clarification and simplification of United States common law and its adaptation to changing social needs. Members of ALI include law professors, practicing attorneys, judges and other professionals in the legal industry. ALI writes documents known as "treatises", which are summaries of state common law. Many courts and legislatures look to ALI's treatises as authoritative reference material concerning many legal issues. However, some legal experts and the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, along with some conservative commentators, have voiced concern about ALI rewriting the law.

Critical legal studies (CLS) is a school of critical theory that developed in the United States during the 1970s. CLS adherents claim that laws are devised to maintain the status quo of society and thereby codify its biases against marginalized groups.

Legal realism is a naturalistic approach to law; it is the view that jurisprudence should emulate the methods of natural science, that is, it should rely on empirical evidence. Hypotheses must be tested against observations of the world.

Legal formalism is both a descriptive theory and a normative theory of how judges should decide cases. In its descriptive sense, formalists maintain that judges reach their decisions by applying uncontroversial principles to the facts; formalists believe that there is an underlying logic to the many legal principles that may be applied in different cases. These principles, they claim, are straightforward and can be readily discovered by anyone with some legal expertise. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., by contrast, believed that "The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience". The formalist era is generally viewed as having existed from the 1870s to the 1920s, but some scholars deny that legal formalism ever existed in practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Originalism</span> Constitutional interpretation doctrine

Originalism is a method of constitutional and statutory interpretation. Originalists assert that legal text should be interpreted based on the original understanding at the time of adoption. Originalists object to the idea of the significant legal evolution being driven by judges in a common law framework and instead favor modifications of laws through the Legislature or through Constitutional amendment.

Legislative history includes any of various materials generated in the course of creating legislation, such as committee reports, analysis by legislative counsel, committee hearings, floor debates, and histories of actions taken. Legislative history is used for discovering sources of information about a legislature's intent in enacting a law, although jurists disagree widely about the extent to which a statute's legislative history has bearing on the meaning of its text.

Statutory interpretation is the process by which courts interpret and apply legislation. Some amount of interpretation is often necessary when a case involves a statute. Sometimes the words of a statute have a plain and a straightforward meaning. But in many cases, there is some ambiguity in the words of the statute that must be resolved by the judge. To find the meanings of statutes, judges use various tools and methods of statutory interpretation, including traditional canons of statutory interpretation, legislative history, and purpose. In common law jurisdictions, the judiciary may apply rules of statutory interpretation both to legislation enacted by the legislature and to delegated legislation such as administrative agency regulations.

The plain meaning rule, also known as the literal rule, is one of three rules of statutory construction traditionally applied by English courts. The other two are the "mischief rule" and the "golden rule".

Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.

Leslie John Green is a Scottish-Canadian legal scholar specialising in jurisprudence. He is Professor of the Philosophy of Law and Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford University, and Professor of Law and Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Queen's University, Kingston. A legal positivist, his research also focuses on political philosophy and constitutional theory.

Pamela Munro is an American linguist who specializes in Native American languages. She is a distinguished research professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she has held a position since 1974.

Stefan Th. Gries is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.

Ambiguity occurs when a single word or phrase may be interpreted in two or more ways. As law frequently involves lengthy, complex texts, ambiguity is common. Thus, courts have evolved various doctrines for dealing with cases in which legal texts are ambiguous.

The purposive approach is an approach to statutory and constitutional interpretation under which common law courts interpret an enactment within the context of the law's purpose.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judicial interpretation</span> Ways courts interpret laws, especially Constitutional laws

Judicial interpretation is the way in which the judiciary construes the law, particularly constitutional documents, legislation and frequently used vocabulary. This is an important issue in some common law jurisdictions such as the United States, Australia and Canada, because the supreme courts of those nations can overturn laws made by their legislatures via a process called judicial review.

Law and corpus linguistics (LCL) is an academic sub-discipline that uses large databases of examples of language usage equipped with tools designed by linguists called corpora to better get at the meaning of words and phrases in legal texts. Thus, LCL is the application of corpus linguistic tools, theories, and methodologies to issues of legal interpretation in much the same way law and economics is the application of economic tools, theories, and methodologies to various legal issues.

Emily Menon Bender is an American linguist who is a professor at the University of Washington. She specializes in computational linguistics and natural language processing. She is also the director of the University of Washington's Computational Linguistics Laboratory. She has published several papers on the risks of large language models and on ethics in natural language processing.

The rule of lenity, also called the rule of strict construction, is a principle of criminal statutory interpretation that requires that when a law is unclear or ambiguous, a court must apply the law in the manner that is most favorable to the defendant. The rule has a long history in the law and has been an important element of the relationship between the courts and the legislature, but its role in modern jurisprudence is less clear.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sławomira Wronkowska-Jaśkiewicz</span>

Sławomira Kazimiera Wronkowska-Jaśkiewicz, PR is a Polish legal scholar, Professor emeritus of Jurisprudence at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. She has a particular interest in legal theory, legislation, legal interpretation, legal reasoning and philosophy of law. She belongs to the Poznań school of legal theory.

Experimental jurisprudence (X-Jur) is an emerging field of legal scholarship that explores the nature of legal phenomena through psychological investigations of legal concepts. The field departs from traditional analytic legal philosophy in its ambition to elucidate common intuitions in a systematic fashion employing the methods of social science. Equally, unlike research in legal psychology, X-Jur emphasises the philosophical implications of its findings, such as whether, how, and in what respects the law's content is a matter of moral perspective. Whereas some legal theorists have welcomed X-Jur's emergence, others have expressed reservations about the contributions it seeks to make.

References

  1. "Brian G. Slocum". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-04-30.
  2. Bix, Brian (2017-05-29). "Philosophy of Language and Legal Interpretation". Jurisprudence. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  3. Boyce, Madeline (2016). "Book Note: Ordinary Meaning, A Theory Of The Most Fundamental Principle Of Legal Interpretation, by Brian G. Slocum". Osgoode Hall Law Journal. 53 (3): 1124–1126. doi: 10.60082/2817-5069.3056 . S2CID   152025982 via CanLII.
  4. "FSU Law Focus" (PDF).
  5. "The Immigration Rule of Lenity and Chevron Deference". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  6. "The Importance of Being Ambiguous: Substantive Canons, Stare Decisis, and the Central Role of Ambiguity Determinations in the Administrative State". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  7. "Canons, the Plenary Power Doctrine, and Immigration Law". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  8. "The Meaning of Sex: Dynamic Words, Novel Applications, and Original Public Meaning". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  9. "Statutory interpretation from the outside". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  10. "Ordinary meaning and corpus linguistics". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2023-05-07.
  11. Slocum, Brian (1999). "RICO and the Legislative Supremacy Approach to Federal Criminal Lawmaking". Loy. U. Chi. Lj. 31: 639. Retrieved 2023-05-07.