142
Does “and” really mean “and”? Not always, the Supreme Court rules.
(www.motherjones.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
142 points (96.7% liked)
politics
19097 readers
1727 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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.