ZusammenfassungDer vorliegende Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über das deutsche Kinderschutzsystem im Kontext der Sozialen Arbeit. Das System ist in die Gesamtlogik der Kinder- und Jugendhilfe ...eingebettet und basiert auf einer Vielzahl von Gesetzestexten. Der Beitrag untersucht vor diesem Hintergrund rechtliche Grundlagen, Leistungsformen, Institutionen, akademische Qualifikationen und aktuelle Debatten. Abschließend wird zur Diskussion gestellt, dass das deutsche Kinderschutzsystem einerseits weitgehende Beteiligungsrechte für Nutzer_innen in Aussicht stellt, sich zugleich aber eine zu bewältigende Care-Krise abzeichnet.
Despite their ever-increasing presence in everyday life, contracts remain notoriously inaccessible to laypeople. Why? Here, a corpus analysis (n ≈10 million words) revealed that contracts contain ...startlingly high proportions of certain difficult-to-process features–including low-frequency jargon, center-embedded clauses (leading to long-distance syntactic dependencies), passive voice structures, and non-standard capitalization–relative to nine other baseline genres of written and spoken English. Two experiments (N=184) further revealed that excerpts containing these features were recalled and comprehended at lower rates than excerpts without these features, even for experienced readers, and that center-embedded clauses inhibited recall more-so than other features. These findings (a) undermine the specialized concepts account of legal theory, according to which law is a system built upon expert knowledge of technical concepts; (b) suggest such processing difficulties result largely from working-memory limitations imposed by long-distance syntactic dependencies (i.e., poor writing) as opposed to a mere lack of specialized legal knowledge; and (c) suggest editing out problematic features of legal texts would be tractable and beneficial for society at-large.
The Supreme Court's recent decisions and the public's loss of faith in the Court can be attributed to disputes about the determinacy of legal texts. These disputes arise from differing ...interpretations of the Constitution and statutes, with some viewing them as more determinate and others as more indeterminate. However, structurally reforming the Court, such as increasing its size or imposing term limits, would not resolve these interpretive debates. Instead, it would undermine the Court's independence and legitimacy, as well as set a dangerous precedent of politicizing the judiciary. Furthermore, such reforms would not address the underlying issue of Congress's inability to legislate effectively on important issues. Instead, the focus should be on strengthening Congress as an institution and amending the legal texts to be more or less specific, depending on the issue at hand. By doing so, the Court can remain within its legal lane, regain public trust, and the perception of the Court as a political institution can be reversed.
TESTING ORDINARY MEANING Tobia, Kevin P.
Harvard law review,
12/2020, Letnik:
134, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Within legal scholarship and practice, among the most pervasive tasks is the interpretation of texts. And within legal interpretation, perhaps the most pervasive inquiry is the search for “ordinary ...meaning.” Jurists often treat ordinary meaning analysis as an empirical inquiry, aiming to discover a fact about how people understand language. When evaluating ordinary meaning, interpreters rely on dictionary definitions or patterns of common usage, increasingly via “legal corpus linguistics” approaches. However, the most central question about these popular methods remains open: Do they reliably reflect ordinary meaning? This Article presents experiments that assess whether (a) dictionary definitions and (b) common usage data reflect (c) how people actually understand language today.
The Article elaborates the implications of two main experimental results. First, neither the dictionary nor legal corpus linguistics methods reliably track ordinary people’s judgments about meaning. This finding shifts the argumentative burden to jurists who rely on these tools to identify “ordinary meaning” or “original public meaning”: these views must articulate and demonstrate a reliable method of analysis. Moreover, this divergence illuminates several interpretive fallacies. For example, advocates of legal corpus linguistics often contend that the nonappearance of a specific use in a corpus indicates that the use is not part of the relevant term’s ordinary meaning. The experiments reveal this claim to be a “Nonappearance Fallacy.” Ordinary meaning exceeds datasets of common usage — even very large ones.
Second, dictionary and legal corpus linguistics verdicts diverge dramatically from each other. Part of that divergence is explained by the finding that broad dictionary definitions tend to direct interpreters to extensive interpretations, while data of common usage tends to point interpreters to more prototypical cases. This divergence suggests two different criteria that are often relevant in interpretation: a more extensive criterion and a more narrow criterion. Although dictionaries and legal corpus linguistics might, in some cases, help us identify these criteria, a hard legal-philosophical question remains: Which of these two criteria should guide the interpretation of terms and phrases in legal texts? Insofar as there is no compelling case to prefer one, the results suggest that dictionary definitions, legal corpus linguistics, or even other more scientific measures of meaning may not be equipped in principle to deliver simple and unequivocal answers to inquiries about the socalled “ordinary meaning” of legal texts.
The old Turkish official-legal texts, which are important sources in terms ofteaching of the political and linguistic history of the Turks, as well as the Turkish legal system, are also important ...inthe study of the history of theemergence, formation and development of the official-business style in Turkic languages. Only after identifying the features specific to the official-business style and systematizing them on the basis of typological classification, how and in which directions studyingand teachingofficial-legal texts and other methodological issues can be solved. In this sense, teaching of the official-legal documents belonging to the ancient Turks, especially the stylistic-linguistic analysis of these texts, conditionsthe investigation of the oldTurkic language from different perspectives. The basis of teachingof the texts is the scientific-theoretical clarification of the issue, the interpretation of the official-business style, the concept of the Turkish legal language.
How should social scientists measure institutional complexity? Formal (textually defined) institutional design—and particularly the complexity of formal institutions—is an important object of study ...across political science, law, and public administration. However, because of measurement constraints, existing work on formal institutional design focuses either on single policy areas or “important” legislation, creating clear selection problems. In this article, I propose and validate a novel natural language processing approach designed to extract networks of institutional relationships from legal texts scalably. These “implementing networks” offer a straightforward way to represent the institutional content of law and naturally suggest measures for quantities like institutional complexity. I then apply this method to measure institutional complexity in all American laws enacted from 1993 to 2014. This approach reveals a surprising disconnect between partisan disagreement and institutional complexity among lower-profile legislation, which would have been difficult to detect without this approach.
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