A Statistical Test for Legal Interpretation: Theory and Applications
提出一种统计检验方法，用于判断两组人对同一词语是否赋予不同含义，并应用于法律领域，如法官与普通人对“合理”的理解差异，以及商业合同中不同努力标准的语义差异。
Abstract Many questions of legal interpretation hinge on whether two groups of people assign different meanings to the same word. For example: Do 18th- and 21st-century English speakers assign the same meaning to commerce? Do judges and laypersons agree on what makes conduct reasonable? We propose a new statistical test to answer such questions. In three applications, we use our test to (1) quantify differences in the meanings of specialized words from civil procedure, (2) identify statistically significant differences between judges and laypersons’ understandings of reasonable and consent, and (3) assess differences across various effort standards in commercial contracts (phrases like best effort and good faith effort). Our approach may be readily applied outside the law to quantify semantic disagreements between or within groups..