Contents -- Preface -- Introduction: Judging Language -- 1. Chomsky and Cardozo: Linguistics and the Law -- Cardozo's Hope: Keeping the Law Flexible -- Chomsky and the Nature of Linguistic Knowledge -- Chomsky, Cardozo, and Mrs. Palsgraf -- 2. The Judge as Linguist -- The Last Antecedent Rule -- Mrs. Anderson's Case -- Processing Strategies and the Last Antecedent Rule -- The Across the Board Rule: Mr. Judge -- Drugs and the Last Antecedent Rule -- Last Antecedents and Legal Canons -- Empty Words: The Interpretation of Pronouns -- Mr. Bass -- Pronouns and Taxation -- The And/Or Rule -- Problems of Scope-And Means Or -- Support of Delinquent Children-The Problem with And/Or -- Mr. Caine-Or Means And -- Adjectives and the Linguistics of Capital Punishment -- Why Judges Do Not Make Good Linguists -- 3. Stacking the Deck -- The Rule of Lenity -- Yermian: Lenity and the Scope of Adverbs -- What about Brown? -- RICO-Lenity and the Meaning of Words -- The Linguistics of Insurance Policies -- The Jacober Accident -- Ignoring Language-Partridge -- Understanding Ambiguous Contracts -- 4. When the Language Is Clear -- How Plain Can Language Be? -- The "Plain Language" of RICO -- When the Language and Its Opposite Are Both Plain -- Understanding Patterns: RICO as an Unclear Statute -- Turkette and Russello Revisited: Some More Fuzzy Concepts -- When Is Plain Language Enough? -- 5. Too Much Precision -- The Quest for Precision -- Pronouns, Precision, and the Law -- Pronouns and the Fifth Amendment -- Devices to Limit Ambiguity of Reference in Legal Language -- Party of the First Part -- Replacing Pronouns with Names -- Said and Same -- Using Special Words -- The War against Legal Language -- How Much Better Can We Do? -- 6. Some Problems with Words: Trying to Understand the Constitution -- People, Corporations, and Other Creatures -- What Is a Corporation.

Corporations, the Lexicon, and the Fifth Amendment -- Testimony and the Act of Speech -- The Current State of the Fifth Amendment -- Speech Acts: Linguistics and the Fifth Amendment -- Admissions -- Admitting by Bleeding -- What Is a Search? -- The Word "Search" -- The Fourth Amendment and the Lexicon -- Some Easy Cases and Some Hard Ones -- 7. Why It Hasn't Gotten Any Better -- Anderson and the Status Quo -- Expanding Legal Doctrine -- Getting Tough -- The Language of Judges -- Notes -- Table of Cases -- Index.