Thursday, March 06, 2008
Semantics
I’ve never understood the condemnation of law as “semantics.” It is true that the practice of law depends on rhetoric. But there is nothing wrong with that at all. To the contrary, it is the great triumph of civilization, that we are able to settle disputes, including those involving contested principles of great importance, through language – rather than physical conflict. It makes no more sense to condemn lawyers for their dependence on words than it does to condemn mathematicians for their dependence on numbers. Indeed, one of the great challenges for law students entering the profession is appreciating the tremendous importance of words – of accuracy and precision (and, incidentally, accuracy and precision, to be accurate and precise, are different concepts). There are numerous litigated cases, which have passed into urban legend, that turn on the crucial distinction between “and” and “or” or the omission of a comma, and so on. It is for this reason that grade-school grammar lessons are worth reviewing: a restrictive clause and a non-restrictive clause are different in substance, not style. Whatever laypeople may believe, a lawyer would be remiss if she believed that her work was merely “semantics” in a pejorative sense.
