Few readers of this journal will, I suspect, care very much about whether a racing pigeon counts as a type of ‘poultry’ (chapter four of this book), but many will no doubt have strong views on whether a Jaffa Cake is a ‘biscuit’ or a ‘cake’ (chapter six). In a 1991 case before a UK tax tribunal, the judge decided in favour of cake, which meant that Jaffa Cakes would be zero-rated for Value Added Tax (VAT). One might, of course, suggest that the product name is a clue: on the other hand, ‘cappuccino’ is routinely promoted as a type of ‘coffee’, when a more accurate term would be ‘warm milk with a vague coffee aroma’, so brand labels cannot be trusted. The ruling listed eleven criteria for biscuithood, including the item's size, packaging and ingredients, and whether it is sold in the biscuit section or the cake section of supermarkets. Personally I find criterion eight, the ‘ageing process’, decisive: do you store Jaffa cakes in the biscuit tin along with digestives and custard creams, or in their own container? As any right-thinking, middle-aged British intellectual knows, you don't store them in the biscuit tin unless you want your digestives to go soggy. They are therefore not biscuits, and the judge was right.

Legal language has all the ingredients for an excellent teaching subject: some of it is faintly ridiculous (see the previous paragraph); some of it is about very important matters (see below); the subject raises key issues in semantics and pragmatics in a very concrete form (see Marmor & Soames Reference Marmor and Soames2011); parts of it pose immense intellectual challenges for keen students to run with; and it is of obvious practical use for anyone who deals with the law – which is most of us at some point in our lives. Christopher Hutton's new textbook is a valuable contribution to the growing literature in the field. It only covers one part of the subject: the interpretation of statutes by courts, as lawyers call it, and not the linguistic devices used by lawyers in courtrooms, legal translation, ‘language crimes’ such as defamation and obscenity, and so on. Within these perfectly reasonable limits Hutton achieves his aims admirably. The book's main strength is a series of fourteen case studies which take up all but 50 of its pages. The author presents each case in a very readable and lively way, and gives a masterly summary of the linguistic and legal issues at the end of each chapter, along with suggestions of related issues for further study.

Continuing the food theme, one chapter revolves around whether Pringles are potato crisps (not in the view of the UK High Court, but the Court of Appeal disagreed). More important issues in the book include whether a post-operative transgender woman is a woman for the purpose of marriage (a Hong Kong case from 2010: two lower courts said no, but the Court of Final Appeal said yes, a welcome decision in my view in favour of a hugely oppressed group of people); whether the Cherokee nation was a ‘foreign state’ under US law, and could claim compensation for a series of shabby land seizures by the State of Georgia (1831 – the decision, unsurprisingly for a colonial court, was no); and whether a corporation counts as a ‘person’, a 2010 case in the US with enormous political implications: the Supreme Court ruled that corporations counted as persons whose right to ‘freedom of speech’ was protected by the First Amendment, and that they could therefore intervene in elections as much as they want – an appalling assault on democracy in the view of many people (see Chomsky Reference Chomsky2010).

I was less convinced by the introductory chapters, which present some basic groundwork in semantics and legal interpretation. The semantics chapter claims that ‘[t]he ideal of one word–one meaning is a fundamental reference point in semantics’ (23): but a quick look at a dictionary (or, for that matter, a semantics textbook) will soon convince you that it is mostly only technical terms like mucopolysaccharide which are monosemous, while the majority of everyday words have multiple senses. (If you want to see how much work is involved to produce ‘Controlled English’ without lexical or sentential ambiguity, take a look at the brutal rules of ASD simplified technical English (ASD 2014, or Kaiser Reference Kaiser2013) for an introductory overview. The result is very different from everyday language). Hutton deals with polysemy and vagueness, of course, but sometimes he confuses matters even more. Here's what he says about ‘negotiating the semantic maze’:

I find it hard to believe that an undergraduate with no previous acquaintance with linguistics would make much sense of this. What are ‘modes of explanation’, and why do we need them? How is a meaning a ‘part’ of a word? What does ‘realized’ mean here? What is an ‘intention’? How do meanings ‘arise’? Experienced linguists can probably work out what Hutton has in mind, but students are likely to struggle – unnecessarily in my view. Later in the book, Hutton seems to sympathise with the view that decontextual meaning is ‘a fiction of law’ (196). If he believes that (and I think he should), then he is adopting position (c) in the list above, and he could usefully argue for this position forcefully earlier in the book: he can present objections to this view, of course, and invite readers to decide for themselves if he is right. Textbooks don't have to present every point of view approvingly: they can argue for one while encouraging students to think for themselves. In general, Hutton's introductory chapters try to give a fair and balanced survey of a range of difficult issues in semantics. As this example illustrates, he has to cover much ground in a small space – and I don't think he succeeds.

As the examples mentioned hitherto would suggest, many legal disputes centre round whether a general term like potato crisp can be taken to include a particular item (Pringles) which has some, but not all, of the characteristics of prototypical members of the class designated by the term. Hutton rightly points out that legal textbooks conventionally give three maxims for such cases (26–27):

1. (i) The literal rule: follow the literal meaning, even if this results in absurdity.

2. (ii) The golden rule: follow the plain and natural meaning, unless this would result in injustice or absurdity.

3. (iii) The mischief rule: the judge should try to identify the aim of the law, and should try to suppress the mischief that the law targets and advance the remedy for the mischief.

(See Smith Reference Smith2010: 121–142; Holland & Webb Reference Holland and Webb2006: 227–279.) He argues that maxim (ii) is ‘the default position’ and ‘the most important principle’ (39), though his third chapter goes on to examine some of the difficulties surrounding the notion of ‘ordinary, everyday meaning’. He refers to several cases where judges have relied on dictionaries but academic linguists have criticised this practice as subjective and flawed (45), and concludes by suggesting that ‘ordinary language and ordinary meaning should, arguably, be seen as legal fictions’ (57). Again, I would have preferred Hutton to make his position clear from the start, rather than taking us on a guided tour of positions which he actually thinks are misguided. If maxim (ii) is the traditional default, but he thinks that maxim (iii) is better, then he should say so and argue against judges and legal theorists who think otherwise. Similarly, in his concluding chapter Hutton comes close to criticising the UK and US legal systems on the grounds that the routine appeal to common sense and ‘ordinary language’ by judges means that ‘the underlying assumptions and massive social and ideological scaffold of beliefs, common sense assumptions, frames, intentions and ideologies are invisible or barely glimpsed’ (198) – an eloquent and in my view accurate statement that could have been developed more, or, indeed, used as the basis for the whole book.

It is worth comparing Hutton's fair and balanced survey with another recent book on legal language, Marmor (Reference Marmor2014) – a research monograph rather than a textbook, but with some clear arguments that students at any level could usefully think about. For example, Marmor (Reference Marmor2014: 88) distinguishes two types of vagueness in language:

1. (i) Transparent vagueness: there are borderline cases which are unclear. Examples include ‘rich’ and ‘bald’.

2. (ii) Extravagant vagueness: the meaning of a word or phrase is multidimensional with at least some incommensurable elements. An example is ‘neglecting a child’.

For Marmor, two items are incommensurable if their relative value is not self-evident. No doubt the age of the child, and the length of time for which they are abandoned, are elements of neglect but ‘can we say whether it is worse to leave a two-year old child unattended for ten minutes than a six-year old unattended for two hours?’ (Marmor Reference Marmor2014: 89). In such instances, the law cannot specify precise cut-off points and judges have to make difficult decisions based partly on semantics and partly on the facts of a particular case. Presenting this distinction to students and asking them to evaluate it and try to apply it would be an excellent teaching strategy. Nothing in Hutton's book has quite the bite and applicability of Marmor's distinction. True, Hutton notes that legal adjudication often takes a ‘check-list approach’, in which ‘judges tend to run through a list of possible approaches and arguments, and feel most secure when each approach yields the same answer or at least does not disturb the overall cohesion’ (64). But what type of reasoning is used when different approaches and arguments yield different answers? Judges then have to decide which arguments carry most weight. How do they do this, and which linguistic and logical tools can we bring to bear in analysing their decisions? Hutton doesn't tackle this question head-on, and that's a pity.

Hutton's book skirts with, but never quite grasps, the vital issue of the relation between legal language and legal reasoning. There is a lot wrong with British- and American-style legal systems, but one of their great strengths is that judges (but not, of course, juries) have to give reasons for their decisions. In cases which go to higher courts and are tried by senior judges, the reasoning is public, usually available on the internet, and subject to analysis and criticism. If you have never read a legal judgement in detail, I urge you to find one and study the careful separation of different issues, the evaluation of different types of evidence, the references to previous cases, and the conclusions. Cases where there is also a dissenting minority judgement – common in Supreme Court cases in the UK and the US – are particularly interesting, as trained legal minds faced with the same facts come to opposing conclusions. For one thing, these documents are a superb starting point for teaching school and university students about how to base conclusions on evidence. We need more resources about the language and logic of legal reasoning: this book provides a starting point, but could have gone further. Incidentally, within continental Europe, legal language and legal reasoning are conceptualized very differently from Anglo-American common law (see Dainow Reference Dainow1966–67). A book similar to this one but which compared the two systems would be very welcome.

A better understanding of the legal system, including criticism of it, is in everyone's interest. Learning about legal language and legal reasoning in schools should arguably be obligatory – and could be very successful. Books like this one are a positive step in that direction.