statutory interpretation

Linguistic Corpora as a Tool of Statutory Interpretation: American Theory and Practice

Prof. dr hab. Zygmunt Tobor, dr Mateusz Zeifert

University of Silesia in Katowice

English abstract: In American adjudicating practice and theory of statutory interpretation, great attention is paid to the notion of ordinary meaning of legal text. In order to determine the ordinary meaning, judges usually refer to their own linguistic intuition or dictionaries – both these methods give rise to a number of reservations that have been expressed in legal literature for years. In the last few years, courts have also started using linguistic corpora for this purpose. Linguistic corpora are electronic collections of authentic texts in a given language which can be analyzed using IT tools (e.g. searches, frequency lists, concordances, collocations). Corpus research requires considerable linguistic knowledge and technical skills, and in return it offers statistical data that can reveal a lot about the semantic layer of language. The use of corpora by judges – first in state courts, later also in the federal Supreme Court – sparked lively academic discussion. In Polish literature, this issue has not been discussed so far, which is why the article is essentially of a reporting nature. First, an outline of corpus linguistics is presented. Then the history of the use of linguistic corpora by US courts is reconstructed. Finally, the legal discussion about corpora in the US is presented, with particular emphasis on voices approving their use and on critical voices.

Keywords: statutory interpretation, corpus linguistics, linguistic corpora, US case law

Language: Polish

Published: Number 4(25)/2020, pp. 80-90.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.4.80

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A Judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union from the Perspective of Cognitive Theory of Prototypes: A Case Study

Dr Mateusz Zeifert

University of Silesia in Katowice

English abstract: Interpretative doubts in the application of law are usually born of discrepancies between the statutory language and the non-linguistic reality. Therefore, they pose the problem of categorization. The theory of law and legal practice have for centuries been dominated by the classical theory of categorization, according to which conceptual categories can be described by a set of sufficient and necessary features. In the 1970s, an American researcher Eleanor Rosch conducted a series of psychological experiments that led her to question the classical theory and lay the foundations for an alternative one, known as the prototype theory. According to this approach, conceptual categories are organized around the most typical exemplars (prototypes), and membership of a category is measured by similarity to the prototype. Some of the consequences of such view are that category membership is a gradable feature and that the borderlines of categories are fuzzy. The article presents an outline of the prototype theory in the version used in cognitive linguistics. Its usefulness for the theory and practice of statutory interpretation is tested on the basis of the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union regarding the concept of beer. In this judgment, the CJEU refused to define the concept of beer by setting requirements as to its raw material composition and ruled that beer is a product that has organoleptic characteristics of beer. This definition on the basis of classical theory appears to be tautological, however, it finds theoretical justification in the prototype theory. In conclusions, the author indicates research problems that must be taken up in order for the prototype theory to be reliably used in jurisprudence.

Keywords: categorization, semantics, prototype theory, statutory interpretation

Language: Polish

Published: Number 2(23)/2020, pp. 109-120.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.36280/AFPiFS.2020.2.109

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Number of downloads: 42

Legislative Materials as a Tool for Solving Grammatical Problems in Statutory Interpretation

Dr hab. Agnieszka Bielska Brodziak, Dr Mateusz Zeifert

University of Silesia

Abstract: The article begins with a presentation of an interpretative tool in the form of materials from the legislative process (legislative materials, legislative history), including arguments offered in the theory of law in favour and against their use for interpretation purposes. These matters are then discussed with references to a specific type of interpretive problems, namely problems that stem from the grammatical constructions of the provisions of the law. The authors analyse five cases in which Polish courts reach for legislative materials in order to resolve doubts caused by sentence syntax, conjunctions or punctuation. The decisions issued vary – in their use of legislative materials courts deploy various other tools and values (e.g. vocabularies, formal logic, the ratio legis behind a provision or the rules of legislative procedure). The outcomes of such a confrontation are varied. Thus, the judgments presented here are a good illustration of the diversity of issues connected with the theoretical and practical aspects of the use of legislative materials in the process of interpreting the law.

Keywords: legislative history, legislative materials, statutory interpretation, grammatical problems

Language: English

Received: 02.10.2017
Accepted: 15.12.2017

Published: Number 2(17)/2018, pp. 18-34.

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Number of downloads: 94