Semantics etc.

In the light of the current debate about the qualifications for being a supreme court justice, I would like to enter the claim that semanticists are a prime candidate pool for the White House to explore.

Take for instance the decision in Small v. United States from April 26, 2005. The background:

Petitioner Small was convicted in a Japanese Court of trying to smuggle firearms and ammunition into that country. He served five years in prison and then returned to the United States, where he bought a gun. Federal authorities subsequently charged Small under 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(1), which forbids “any person … convicted in any court … of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year … to … possess … any firearm.”

Small subsequently argued that any court was not meant to encompass foreign courts, only domestic ones. The Supreme Court agreed.

The arguments in the decision are a good case study of semantics/pragmatics in the real world (well, real in as much as legal reasoning is real). Here are some excerpts:

The question before us is whether the statutory reference “convicted in any court” includes a conviction entered in a foreign court. The word “any” considered alone cannot answer this question. In ordinary life, a speaker who says, “I’ll see any film,” may or may not mean to include films shown in another city.

In law, a legislature that uses the statutory phrase ” ‘any person’ ” may or may not mean to include ” ‘persons’ ” outside “the jurisdiction of the state.” See, e.g., United States v. Palmer, 3 Wheat. 610, 631 (1818) (Marshall, C. J.) (”[G]eneral words,” such as the word “‘any,’ ” must “be limited” in their application “to those objects to which the legislature intended to apply them”); Nixon v. Missouri Municipal League, 541 U. S. 125, 132 (2004) (” ‘any’ ” means “different things depending upon the setting”); United States v. Alvarez-Sanchez, 511 U. S. 350, 357 (1994) (”[R]espondent errs in placing dispositive weight on the broad statutory reference to ‘any’ law enforcement officer or agency without considering the rest of the statute”); Middlesex County Sewerage Authority v. National Sea Clammers Assn., 453 U. S. 1, 15–16 (1981) (it is doubtful that the phrase ” ‘any statute’ ” includes the very statute in which the words appear); Flora v. United States, 362 U. S. 145, 149 (1960) (”[A]ny sum,” while a “catchall” phase, does not “define what it catches”). Thus, even though the word “any” demands a broad interpretation, see, e.g., United States v. Gonzales, 520 U. S. 1, 5 (1997), we must look beyond that word itself.

In determining the scope of the statutory phrase we find help in the “commonsense notion that Congress generally legislates with domestic concerns in mind.” Smith v. United States, 507 U. S. 197, 204, n. 5 (1993). This notion has led the Court to adopt the legal presumption that Congress ordinarily intends its statutes to have domestic, not extraterritorial, application. See Foley Bros., Inc. v. Filardo, 336 U. S. 281, 285 (1949); see also Palmer, supra, at 631 (”The words ‘any person or persons,’ are broad enough to comprehend every human being” but are “limited to cases within the jurisdiction of the state”); EEOC v. Arabian American Oil Co., 499 U. S. 244, 249–251 (1991). That presumption would apply, for example, were we to consider whether this statute prohibits unlawful gun possession abroad as well as domestically.

The statute’s language does not suggest any intent to reach beyond domestic convictions. Neither does it mention foreign convictions nor is its subject matter special, say, immigration or terrorism, where one could argue that foreign convictions would seem especially relevant. To the contrary, if read to include foreign convictions, the statute’s language creates anomalies.

For example, the statute specifies that predicate crimes include “a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence.” 18 U. S. C. §922(g)(9). Again, the language specifies that these predicate crimes include only crimes that are “misdemeanor[s] under Federal or State law.” §921(a)(33)(A). If “convicted in any court” refers only to domestic convictions, this language creates no problem. If the phrase also refers to foreign convictions, the language creates an apparently senseless distinction between (covered) domestic relations misdemeanors committed within the United States and (uncovered) domestic relations misdemeanors committed abroad.

The Supreme Court’s doctrine therefore seems to be that “any” like other quantifiers can be contextually restricted, that what the restrictions are depends on the intentions of the speaker (here: Congress), and that one can infer the intentions by seeing what interpretations make sense in the context of other utterances in the same text.

Justices Thomas, Scalia, and Kennedy dissented, saying that the court’s decision “institutes the troubling rule that “any” does not really mean “any,” but may mean “some subset of ‘any,’ ” even if nothing in the context so indicates”. They point out that the Court at some point in the decision hypothesizes that “that Congress did not consider whether the generic phrase ‘convicted in any court’ applies to domestic as well as foreign convictions” but then proceeds to uncover the implicit intentions of what they must have meant.

Intriguing stuff, and not a single semanticist/pragmaticist was called as an expert witness.

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