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In Re: Family Room Messes

By Eric L. Lipman

Assistant Professor Hillel Y. Levin, of the University of Georgia Law School, recently posted to the Social Science Research Network a hilarious (and very insightful) working paper on the various modes of statutory construction.

In the paper, Everything I Needed to Learn About Legisprudence I Learned by the Time I Was Nine, Levin charts various instances of claimed violations of his Mother?s rule that ?no food may be eaten outside of the kitchen.?

This rule is later tested in a variety of real-life and funny ways; and a set of jurists ? Father, Babysitter, Uncle Rick, Grandmother ? each with their own jurisprudential style, weigh in on whether the Mother?s ban on eating in the family room was violated. Does, for example, sipping a mint milkshake in the family room amount to ?eating? outside of the kitchen?

As Levin summarizes, ?[a]lthough the various tools seem perfectly reasonable individually,? (i.e., textualist, literalist, purposivist, legal process, precedent) ?in the aggregate, they can lead to ridiculous results.? And Levin shows us how the rule that ?no food may be eaten outside of the kitchen? can be understood to permit eating food outside of the kitchen.

This delightfully satirical and thought-provoking paper, which only spans six pages, is accessible here.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on October 30, 2008 (boomark / email).