jeffwDoes “and” really mean “and”? Not always, the Supreme Court rules.
MadrigalThis 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:
the defendant—
- (A) does not have more than 4 criminal history points…;
- (B) does not have a prior 3-point offense…; and
- © does not have a prior 2-point violent offense…
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.
ryvenEdit: 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 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”.
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.
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 that screwed 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.