BENJAMIN MINHAO CHEN
For a long time, linguistic canons have been dismissed as dissonant and deficient. But there are ambitions to make linguistic canons guide again. Maxim majoritarianism promises to dissolve opposing canons through the elimination of unsupported pretenders. By empirically identifying the canons that register dominant habits of speech, contemporary jurists hope to bring order to the practice of statutory interpretation.
This Article submits that maxim majoritarianism is futile. It argues that arbitrating between rival canons poses conceptual difficulties that are virtually impossible to resolve. At the same time, it maintains that the co-existence of canon and counter-canon is not necessarily embarrassing. Like practical proverbs, linguistic canons can—and can only—matter if they change beliefs, judgments, and actions—that is, if they are efficacious.
So, do linguistic canons matter? An original experiment tests the efficacy of four classic canons on over 1,500 everyday speakers of English. The last antecedent rule, noscitur a sociis, did not seem to influence how participants construed ambiguous text whereas expressio unius did. These results might be interpreted as further proof of the hollowness of linguistic canons. Yet they also leave open the possibility that linguistic canons can, by signaling avenues of further inquiry, cast fresh light on the ordinary meaning of the law.