New Article: What is Ambiguity?

October 27th, 2009

From SSRN,  Ambiguity About Ambiguity: An Empirical Inquiry into Legal Interpretation (H/T Legal Theory Blog):

Most scholarship on statutory interpretation discusses what courts should do with ambiguous statutes. This paper investigates the crucial and analytically prior question of what ambiguity in law is. Does a claim that a text is ambiguous mean the judge is uncertain about its meaning? Or is it a claim that ordinary readers of English, as a group, would disagree about what the text means? This distinction is of considerable theoretical interest. It also turns out to be highly consequential as a practical matter.

To demonstrate, we developed a survey instrument for exploring determinations of ambiguity and administered it to nearly 1,000 law students. We find that asking respondents whether a statute is “ambiguous” in their own minds produces answers that are strongly biased by their policy preferences. But asking respondents whether the text would likely be read the same way by ordinary readers of English does not produce answers biased in this way. This discrepancy leads to important questions about which of those two ways of thinking about ambiguity is more legally relevant. It also has potential implications for how cases are decided and for how law is taught.

I have always wondered about ambiguity. Declaring a statute as ambiguous frees a Judge up to do a lot of things he could not do if the statute was unambiguous. Under the Chevron doctrine, for example, if a statute is ambiguous, the Court will almost universally appeal to the interpretation of the administrative agency. But what is ambiguous? Is ambiguity a mere cover for a person’s policy preferences? Or can a text be objectively ambiguous. Interesting reading.