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by alwaysdoit 1900 days ago
> To the extent that interpretive canons accurately describe how the English language is generally used, they are useful tools. … [But w]hen this Court describes canons as rules or quotes canons while omitting their caveats and limita­tions, we only encourage the lower courts to relegate statu­tory interpretation to a series of if-then computations. No reasonable reader interprets texts that way. [Alito in concurrence]

Why would it be horrible if there were a well-defined grammar for legal texts?