Former Justice Breyer Speaks At Harvard Panel On Legal Interpretation
He knows his stuff! The post Former Justice Breyer Speaks At Harvard Panel On Legal Interpretation appeared first on Above the Law.
One of the quickest lessons you pick up in law school is that the path to knowing the law doesn’t end at finding a line in the Constitution or a statute and reading it aloud to anyone who would hear it. A major part of thinking like a lawyer is knowing how to read — it’s the hunt for historical context and caselaw that can really get you! The meta-discourse on how to read the law — one of the most interesting things about lawyering — is so important that if you invite experts to discuss legal interpretation at your school, you better make sure you get someone who knows what they’re talking about. Harvard pulled a Harvard and formed a star-studded panel to help their students parse through legal interpretative methods. The Crimson has coverage on who was there:
Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer spoke on the practical challenges of legal interpretation with several legal experts at a Harvard Law School panel hosted by the Harvard Law Review Monday afternoon.
Moderated by Andrew T. Carothers, a third-year law student at HLS, Breyer was joined by Judge Kevin C. Newsom, a HLS alumni and circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Alana C. Frederick, an attorney serving as a judicial law clerk for the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Thomas E. Nielsen, a HLS alumni and litigation associate at a multinational law firm.
It’s no question that Stephen Breyer is the biggest name on the bill, but don’t sleep on Kevin Newsom. Judges are rarely thought of as hands-on investigative and experimental types, but his relatively recent foray into using generative language models to suss out the ordinary meaning of contract terms was super interesting. Just to be clear, he advocated for the potential use of AI as a tool that, in conjunction with the other tools and frameworks like dictionaries and common sense judges normally use to get at the ordinary meaning of words — nothing brash like saying that the judiciary could be replaced if Grok was fed a bunch of judicial opinions. And for what it’s worth, asking a language model the meaning of boneless chicken would probably come up with an answer that makes a lot more sense than the Ohio Supreme Court’s decision that the boneless in “boneless wings” means “of course there might be bones in this, actually.”
The meat of the conversation weighed the merits of a pragmatic and culturally informed approach to legal interpretation with a more formalist and language-bound hermeneutic approach. It’s a heady way of approaching the purpose of interpretation that’s best grasped by concrete problems: take, for example, the question of if fish are “tangible objects” under Sarbanes-Oxley or if the Jan. 6th coup’ers violated — you guessed it — Sarbanes-Oxley.
Would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation! To any law students who get the chance to hear judges talk in-depth about how and why they interpret the law, make sure you take them up on it! Well, unless it’s Judge Stewart Kyle Duncan — he’s not the best at answering questions on method.
Former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer Debates Legal Doctrines in Harvard Law School Panel [The Crimson]
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The post Former Justice Breyer Speaks At Harvard Panel On Legal Interpretation appeared first on Above the Law.
