Appellate Judges Education Institute

Breakout 6: Advanced Legal Writing and Linguistics: Understanding “Any”

Session Description

This interactive workshop will give participants practice in distinguishing issues of lexical vagueness from structural ambiguity by means of hands-on exercises. To highlight this contrast, law and linguistics professors will focus on what is arguably the single most litigated word in English: any. Confusion over any lurks in all areas of law, from insurance contracts to family law to habeas appeals. Presenters will explain a two-step recipe for approaching disputes over the meaning of “any.” First, they will show how to sort disputes into those involving “vague any” from those in which “ambiguous any” gives rise to two readings. Second, participants will learn how to tease apart alternative readings triggered by any. The workshop will then cover techniques for minimizing confusion over any and similar words in drafting, as well as the limits of those techniques. The centerpiece of the session will be breakout group work, in which each table will have a set of cards with instances of any in legal language to paraphrase and classify, using labels provided by the presenters, followed by a debrief and questions.

Learning Objectives

Understand the distinction between lexical vagueness and structural ambiguity through examination of uses of “any”
Learn to apply that distinction in other contexts

Prof. Jill Anderson, Professor of Law, UConn School of Law

Jill Anderson joined the UConn Law faculty on a permanent basis in 2010 after a two-year appointment as a visiting professor. Before coming to UConn she taught for three years at Western New England School of Law, following her work as a Skadden Fellow and staff attorney at Western Massachusetts Legal Services, where she represented low-income disabled individuals challenging discriminatory housing policies and insurance practices.

Professor Anderson is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Lowenstein Public Interest Fellow and earned James Kent Scholar honors. She was studying theoretical linguistics in graduate programs at Stanford University and the University of Copenhagen before an abiding interest in social justice led her to law. Prior to attending Columbia, she spent four years developing diversity training and testing projects at a law firm that monitored consent decrees in the aftermath of civil rights litigation.

Professor Anderson is known for her innovative and consequential scholarship on language and law. Her expertise in linguistics informs her articles on statutory interpretation, which have appeared in the Yale Law Journal and Harvard Law Review, and which reach substantive areas as diverse as disability discrimination, white collar crime, intellectual property, and genocide law. She has presented her work at numerous scholarly events and regularly shares its practical payoff by speaking before judicial and practitioner conferences. Professor Anderson teaches in the areas of insurance, contract, legal interpretation, and law and cognition. She views thoughtful engagement with her students as the best way to explore our legal culture of cognition: what does and should count as “good thinking” in law?

Prof. Elizabeth Coppock, Associate Professor of Linguistics, College of Arts & Sciences, Boston University

Prof. Coppock teaches courses related to semantics and directs the Linguistic Semantics lab. Her research addresses foundational topics in truth, reference, quantification, and measurement in natural language semantics, through the lens of specific empirical puzzles.

Specific phenomena of focus have included object agreement in Hungarian, superlative modifiers like “at least”, opinion statements like “licorice is tasty”, interactions between definiteness-marking and special adjectives like “only” and superlatives in Germanic languages, and cross-linguistic variation and universals in the syntax and semantics of quantity superlatives like “the most”. Her most recent research focus pertains to the operations of multiplication and division among quantities, and cross-linguistic variation in how the concept of ratio is grammatically encoded.

Prof. Coppock’s work has appeared in journals including Natural Language Semantics, Journal of Semantics, Semantics and Pragmatics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, Linguistics and Philosophy, and Language.

Margaret Bullard, Central Staff Attorney, Court of Appeals of Georgia (Moderator)

Margaret Bullard is a Central Staff Attorney at the Court of Appeals of Georgia and the secretary for the Council of Appellate Staff Attorneys. She began her career in private criminal defense, specializing in post-conviction and habeas cases. She then served as a public defender for nearly a decade, exclusively handling criminal cases at all stages of direct appeal across the state, and creating and presenting training materials for hundreds of Georgia defense attorneys. She previously chaired the State Bar of Georgia’s Appellate Practice Section and is the former editor of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers’ members-only publication, “What’s the Decision,” which summarizes recent important decisions of Georgia’s appellate courts. A proud “Double Bear,” Margaret earned her bachelor’s degrees in English and music, magna cum laude, and her juris doctor, cum laude, from Mercer University in Macon, Georgia.

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