Is that Legal? Researching Legal Interpretations from the Perspective of a Judge

Faculty Advisor: Professor, University of Michigan; Licensed attorney, Michigan

Research Program Introduction

When searching the internet on your iPhone, you may have observed behavior that caused you to ask a question:  Is that legal? For example, the police pull over a car with a woman found with a handgun in her purse.  Did she violate the state’s concealed weapons law? Frankly, the answer depends on how the legislators wrote the law. Your internet browsing found other legal problems for sure. Such as a construction worker who gets into a heated argument with a fellow co-worker at a job site, hitting them with a wrench over their head. This is a shocking act, of course. But did the construction worker commit aggravated assault under state law?  Or, maybe you read a story about farmers who sprayed their crops with a pesticide to prevent insects from eating them. The pesticide killed, however, an endangered species on their farms. Are the farmers in serious legal trouble? Did they violate the Federal Endangered Species Act? 

Only research into the relevant statutes and regulations can provide the judge with adequate guidance on the matter.  Further, answers to questions like the ones posed above are not necessarily intuitive; rather, they are answered through settled rules of legal interpretation.  Thus, the answers to these legal questions may sometimes surprise the interpreter. 

In this program, you will be encouraged to think like a judge. We will explore canons of statutory interpretation that interpreters consult when analyzing legal problems. Students will explore selected textual canons of interpretation, and they will then apply those principles to particular hypothetical situations. Specifically, we will focus on the interplay between the statute’s plain meaning and other related rules like noscitur a sociisand ejusdem generis. 

In doing so, we will ask ourselves the following questions. Do these tools of interpretation provide concrete answers to ambiguous legal texts? Do these rules lead to conclusions that may conflict with each other at times? Finally, does a particular interpretation make other words in a statute superfluous or unnecessary? 

At the end of our program, you will be asked to submit a written judgment in response to a short legal hypothetical. A list of hypotheticals that you can select from for your essay will be provided to you in the syllabus, and you can propose alternatives to the professor for his consideration.

All readings will be electronically provided to you as well. I will send you the questions on our readings each week prior to our meetings. Please be prepared to discuss our readings during our sessions. 

Possible Topics For Final Project:

• The Holy Trinity Problem: What is the precise spirit of a law?

• Is an airplane a “motor vehicle” as defined under the statute?

• Does the Anti-picnic statute violate personal freedoms?

• Can a former President be impeached 10 years after office?

• Does assault with a frying pan constitute aggravated assault?

• Or other topics in this subject area that you are interested in, and that your professor approves after discussing it with you.

Program Detail

• Cohort size: 3 to 6 students

• Workload: Around 4 to 5 hours per week (including class and homework time)

• Target students: 9 to 12th graders interested in Law, Political Science, Debate, History, Philosophy, Sociology, and other related fields.

• Schedule: TBD. Meetings will take place for around one hour per week, with a weekly meeting day and time to be determined a few weeks before the start date.