AMBIGUITY ABOUT AMBIGUITY: AN EMPIRICAL INQUIRY INTO LEGAL INTERPRETATION

ABSTRACT 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 …