Linguistic scholarship at the Supreme Court

John Brewer writes:

Today's majority opinion by Justice Gorsuch in Bondi v. Vanderstok cites (on its page 10 of the opinion, which is the 13th page of the linked pdf) "S. Grimm & B. Levin, Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability, in 2 Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) 55 (2017)."  That's a pretty unusual sort of citation to see in a judicial opinion, in my experience.

He also drops a footnote mentioning the amicus brief filed by various "Professors and Scholars of Linguistics and Law," which in turn cites authorities ranging from the SCOTUS-friendly (Scalia & Garner) to the perhaps less-known-in-those-circles Huddleston & Pullum.

For a description of the context and consequences of the cited case, see Abbie VanSickle, "Supreme Court Upholds Biden Administration’s Limits on ‘Ghost Guns’", NYT 3/26/2025:

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld federal restrictions aimed at curtailing access to kits that can be easily assembled into homemade, nearly untraceable firearms, a rare move by a court that has taken an expansive view of gun rights.

In a 7-to-2 decision, written by Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, one of the court’s conservatives, the justices left in place requirements enacted during the Biden administration as part of a broader effort to combat gun violence by placing restrictions on so-called ghost guns.

Justice Gorsuch included photographs, unusual in court opinions, to illustrate how one of the gun kits, Polymer80’s “Buy Build Shoot,” came with “all of the necessary components to build” a Glock-style semiautomatic weapon. He wrote that it was “so easy to assemble” that it could be put together in about 20 minutes.

“Plainly, the finished ‘Buy Build Shoot’ kit is an instrument of combat,” Justice Gorsuch wrote, adding that no one would confuse the pistol “with a tool or a toy.”

…or given John's reservations about that article, check out some of these…

Here's the  opinion's citation to Grimm & Levin:

Plainly, the finished “Buy Build Shoot” kit is an instrument of combat. No one would confuse the semiautomatic pistol pictured above with a tool or a toy. Of course, as sold, the kit requires some assembly. But a number of considerations persuade us that, even as sold, the “Buy Build Shoot” kit qualifies as a “weapon.”

Consider, first, a feature of ordinary language. The term “weapon” is an artifact noun—a word for a thing created by humans. Artifact nouns are typically “characterized by an intended function,” rather than by “some ineffable ‘natural essence.’ ” S. Grimm & B. Levin, Artifact Nouns: Reference and Countability, in 2 Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 47) 55 (2017).3 Reflecting as much, everyday speakers sometimes use artifact nouns to refer to unfinished objects—at least when their intended function is clear. An author might invite your opinion on her latest novel, even if she sends you an unfinished manuscript. A friend might speak of the table he just bought at IKEA, even though hours of assembly remain ahead of him. In both cases, the artifact noun fits because the intended function of the unfinished object is obvious to speaker and listener alike. 

The citation to Scalia & Garner is on pp. 26-27 of the amicus brief:

Respondents, as well as the Fifth Circuit, take the omission of “designed to or may readily be converted to” from subparagraph (B) to be a meaningful exclusion. Pet. App. 17a; VanDerStok Opp. 12-13; Defense Distributed Opp. 14. They conclude on that basis that “frame or receiver” extends only to operable frames and receivers. That is, they invoke the “meaningful variation” canon of statutory interpretation, which is a version of the Consistent Usage canon. See Scalia & Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 170 (2012). The meaningful variation canon states that, “where the document has used one term in one place, and a materially different term in another, the presumption is that the different term denotes a different idea.” Id.

But as Scalia and Garner explain, “[n]o canon of interpretation is absolute…. It is a rare case in which each side does not appeal to a different canon to suggest its desired outcome.” Scalia & Garner, supra, at 59. The frequent availability of conflicting linguistic canons calls their use into question and has even led some commenters to describe their use as “embarrassing.”

The citation to Huddleston & Pullum comes in a footnote on p. 14 of the amicus brief:

The construction used here (“the … Kit, a powerful and compact firearm”), with a comma or hyphen separating the full product name from a descriptive phrase, conveys that the speaker believes that the kit is a firearm.¹¹

¹¹ Specifically, this is an illustration of an “ascriptive [noun phrase] supplement.” See Huddleston & Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language 1357 (2022) (the first part of example [19iib], “Kim Jones, a quite outstanding student, won a scholarship to MIT,” is equivalent in meaning to [19ib], “Kim Jones was a quite outstanding student.”).

John continues:

That brief has an interesting discussion of a survey some of the professors conducted to elicit native-speaker intuitions on the linguistic question the case presented.  Although I am inclined to think that the actual Court should give zero weight to any survey where there was no opportunity for the side against whom it is being used to cross-examine those who conducted it.  

The list of amici who filed briefs on the other side doesn't have any group names that sound linguistics-focused but some of them could of course have made linguistics-informed arguments.  I haven't clicked through enough links to know one way or another.