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Does “and” really mean “and”? Not always, the Supreme Court rules.
(www.motherjones.com)
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this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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This isn’t even remotely ambiguous. The DoJ’s interpretation is correct.
The question isn’t really about the meaning of “and”; it’s about the syntactic structure of the whole section.
A defendant is eligible if they do NOT have (A and B and C). In other words, having any of A, B or C will disqualify them.
The law could have been written in a more readable fashion, for example:
But the meaning is the same either way. Amazing that this got to the Supreme Court.
It’s also entirely plausible that this is exactly what was intended when the law was written.
I don’t think that’s right (imo). And does not mean or. And has additional connotations where or is either or. A and B and C equals A+B+C. This does not equal A or B or C which is what the Supreme Court is trying to argue is true, which it’s not.
In Boolean algebraic notation A+B+C literally means A OR B OR C.
I'm aware this isn't a useful comment with regard to your original point, I just thought the coincidence was too funny to not point out.
Edit: Wait I get it, if you bracket the statements differently (so that "do not have" applies to each one instead of all of them) you get (!A && !B && !C) instead of !(A && B && C). That seems super unintuitive and I can't believe the majority claimed that there's no ambiguity, when I feel like they've chosen the much less obvious interpretation.
Yeah, I feel like the article should have made reference to De Morgan's Law in order to explain the two interpretations. That's the one that says !(A && B && C) = !A || !B || !C, and !(A || B || C) = !A && !B && !C.
In English, there's no proper grouping operator, so it's basically it's a question of whether you distribute the NOT or the AND first over the list.
The Justices are saying that the ambiguity is completely resolved by the way the restrictions don't make sense if you interpret it the other way. But the underlying assumption there is that the laws of this country are logical, free from needless repetition and contradictory requirements, which is a TERRIBLE assumption. Our laws are at best written by a committee of people not very familiar with the subjects of those laws, and at worst written by scam artists who then paid to slip them under the radar and into the books. They're full of idiotic errors, deliberate sabotage, and absurdities. That's the whole reason for the thing about the lenient interpretation, and this decision will change that in a way that gives judges a whole lot of power to do more harm.
I can tell you that as a lawyer whose done a lot of writing on statutory interpretation, I've never seen a case make arguments with this sort of notation.
This case seems clear to me.
I wasn't suggesting the lawyers or the Justices should have talked about DeMorgan's law, but rather that it would have been a helpful point for Mother Jones to bring up in the article, to make sure people are on the same page about the logic. You're right that the notation is probably not helpful though.
The actual legal argument is pretty simple. The law as written is maximally lenient, but also not very logically consistent (e.g. the redundancy indicated in the article). So it seems like some kind of error occurred in the law-writing process. The question is whether they actually meant to write it as maximally restrictive or whether they screwed up in some other way. That certainly seems like ambiguity (a stance supported by the evidence that multiple courts decided these cases in different ways), and the prior standard was that in the case of ambiguity, you had to interpret the law to the benefit of the defendants, which here would be maximally lenient, and indeed also as written. The supreme court has basically reversed that, saying that you can interpret it as maximally restrictive as long as you're pretty sure that's what they meant to say. That's a very different standard.
I think this case is maybe the equivalent of that photo of a striped dress that blew up the Internet a few years ago. Nobody thinks it's particularly ambiguous, but they come to totally different conclusions about what the obvious correct answer is; just because the ambiguity isn't necessarily obvious to the individual reader doesn't mean it's not there.
I would generally interpret a list as a grouping operator in English writing. The "and" is within the group, and in the structure of a regular grouping clause: "a, b, and c". If you wrote "does not have a, b, and c" it would be an extremely tortured reading to apply "not" before "and", especially because there are multiple other ways in English you would write that, e.g. "not have a, b, or c" or "not have any of a, b, and c".
Yeah, this decision assumes that the people who wrote the laws are very precise in their attention to detail and would never leave in a useless clause, while also being so inattentive to language that they wrote an "or" clause with "and" (or at least didn't choose a structure that left no ambiguity).
Topping it all off is going through this whole set of trials with a third of them dissenting and saying "there is no ambiguity anywhere in this law".
I mostly agree with you. The AND was kind of crammed in outside the list too, though; they'd written it as NOT bullet: limit 1, bullet: limit 2, AND bullet: limit 3. Basically I don't think it's implausible that they intended it to be maximally restrictive and just screwed that up. I just think that applying the law as though it means that requires interpreting the law differently from how it's written, and different in a way that harms the defendants, which you previously weren't supposed to do. Which seems super dumb.
English is not a formal logical language and the word “and” works more distributively when doing negations in a way that formal logical formulas do not because they need to be manipulatable in a consistent manner.
Okay but what’s the point of 1 then if it must be all three as just a 3 point and 2 point automatically add up to 5?
Let's look at it this way.
Condition 1 is to disqualify anyone with 5 or more crime points.
Condition 2 is to disqualify anyone who has committed any crime that is worth 3 crime points.
Condition 3 is to disqualify anyone who has committed a crime worth 2 points, but only if it is a violent crime.
So basically, they intend for a violent crime worth 2 points to disqualify you, and they intend for any 3 point crime to disqualify you as well. And they intend for having 5 points to disqualify you.
Worrying about the value of added points is missing the point of the wording of the entire set of rules. Especially if there exist crimes worth 1 crime point. There's a whole range of crimes you can commit and still qualify.
You could commit:
Up to 4 crimes worth 1 point each.
Up to 2 crimes worth 1 point each, as well as one non-violent crime worth 2 points.
And up to 2 non-violent crime worth 2 points each.
The point of condition 1 is to put a cap on the amount of crimes worth 1 or 2 points you can commit.
I hope this helped you understand it the way I understand it.
I don't know, I didn't write it!
This really rests very heavily on the authors of the law not just fucking up and including a useless clause because they didn't do math. They would have to be diligent enough that they could never make any errors in content, but not diligent enough to recognize their wording was ambiguous.
Now thinking about it in terms of mathematical logic, the DoJ and Supreme Court‘s interpretations is wrong:
It’s actually a law of logic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws) that says that:
not (A and B and C)
is equal to
(not A) or (not B) or (not C)
—
In this case:
The defendant is eligible for relief if he does not (A and B and C)
Which is the same as
The defendant is a eligible for relief if he does (not A) or (not B) or (not C)
—
Which is not what the DoJ is saying. The DoJ is saying that
not (A and B and C)
is equal to
(not A) and (not B) and (not C)
You're missing the grammatical point of a itemised list though. Writing
Reads as the "not" distributing so as to create the full sentence(es)
In other words, writing this as an itemised list makes it different from writing it as the sentence
Right! I feel like I’m going crazy because I don’t see how can you interpret it the other way!
The reporter seems to be getting this totally wrong. It’s like he is saying the exact opposite of what I understand. From my point of view:
If a defendant would be elegible for relief if he lacked any one of the conditions, that is actually interpreting that AND means OR.
If a defendant would be eligible for relief if he lacked all of the conditions, that is interpreting that AND means AND.
When you move the "not" to the inner terms, as you did in this reformulation, it flips the ANDs and ORs. That's expected. The original, with the "not" on the outside, has the and/or flip in the majority interpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws
When you move the "not" to the inner terms, as you did in this reformulation, it flips the ANDs and ORs. That's
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Morgan%27s_laws
This was my takeaway as a lawyer. So I'm glad I'm not alone.
Note the crucial difference between writing this as an enumerated list, and writing it as a continuous sentence.
In the former case (used here) the "xyz is not" distributes such that each point on the list can be read as a complete sentence, giving your (correct) interpretation.
What seems to confuse a lot of people is that if you write "xyz is not A, B, and C", the "not" no longer distributes the same way, and (A, B, and C) is read as a single condition, giving the alternate (incorrect) interpretation.
The way you say that is using "or". "Do NOT have (A or B or C)". This interpretation makes expressing the "and" case in a concise form impossible. We already have linguistic rules to say what you and the majority think this says, and whatever poorly specified grammar Kagan uses to describe her weekend availability (I'd still say "I'm not free on Saturday or Sunday"), this is a legal document, meant to use precise language.
As you point out, there is precise language for the construct they ruled for. It wasn't used, while what was used is exactly the form you'd use for "and" meaning "and".
They could have clearly stated, A defendant is ineligible if they have any of the following, (or all of the following, or two of the following, or clearly state the matrix, A or B and C).
List
End of List.
Because in plain English that reads A or B and C. If you're going to use the word and anywhere in a list like that it needs to be at the end of every line you want included.