Scalia’s Linguistic Acumen

Sometimes (in fact quite often) Mark Liberman says things at Language Log that make me want to paint them on the side of the barn. Here is a recent example:

It’s always been a source of wonder to me that (law) code, on which so much depends, is written without any means of bracketing to specify scope, and without even an unambiguous set of conventions for default binding in cases where scope is not explicitly marked. If the universe suddenly shifted so that computer code was written this way, mo...