Episode 065 – Conversation with Prof. Lawrence Solan

Episode 065 – Conversation with Prof. Lawrence Solan.mp3

In this podcast, Brooklyn Law School Professor Lawrence Solan talks about his recent book The Language of Statutes: Laws and Their Interpretation (2010) which is on reserve as part of the BLS Library collection. The book is a balanced view of statutory interpretation and the role of the courts. It examines the jurisprudential and practical aspects of language scholarship for statutory interpretation. In the interview, Prof. Solan relates his own personal experience with the ambiguous interpretation of a statute as well as his own scholarly study of the federal bribery statute and its extensive appellate review. The book joins law, linguistics, and cognitive science to show that statutory interpretation is not in need of a major overhaul as some have suggested. He argues that when cases on the margin occur that the legislature did not foresee, judges must inevitably undertake statutory interpretation. The Language of Statutes follows Prof. Solan's earlier work The Language of Judges and an extensive list of publications which are listed here.