How 'Ordinary' is 'Ordinary Meaning'?

In this issue of the Linguistic Etch-a-Sketch, I welcome my colleague, Adam Nicholas, a historical linguist at the University of Cambridge, to intervene. In his piece, Adam interrogates a common legal construction - the notion of “ordinary meaning” - and provides his expert opinion on its use. The significance to computational law? As Adam shall reveal, it is precisely owed to the impossibility of defining ‘ordinary meaning’ that translation, from law to code, is not as intuitive as some might profess. Rather, meaning is a far more nuanced and complex exercise that cannot simply be resolved through logic alone. Without a sufficient understanding of how meaning operates and is manifested in the natural language realm, constructing law in code is unthinkable. Therefore, in his work, we hope to address how the science of language provides the blueprint on the future of legal text.