Language Log

The late David Mellinkoff, in his much venerated The Language of the Law (Little Brown1963), traces and/or back to scholarly concerns about the correct translation of some famous words in the Magna Carta:

…nisi per legale judicium parium suorum vel per legem terrae.

"Except by lawful judgment of his peers vel by the law of the land."

The debate over the meaning of vel raged. Does it mean and or or?

In response to my post earlier today on "Sex-neutral 'he': the constitutional question", David Seidman writes:

This has nothing directly to do with your post on the sex-neutral he, but I thought you might be interested in a concurring opinion by Justice Blackmun in a Supreme Court case involving an old statute dealing with law suits over land transactions between Indians and "white person[s]." Justice Blackmun read the term to include black persons, yellow persons, and anyone else who was not an Indian.

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Geoff Pullum has argued in a number of posts that English he can't be a sex-neutral pronoun (e.g. "Lying feminist ideologues wreck English, says Yale prof", 3/2/2008). This question has recently taken on new practical significance, according to an article in the Reno Gazette-Journal by Anjeanette Damon ("Lawsuit: Woman can't be president", 4/9/2008):

In a lawsuit that legal scholars call "amusing," a Reno man is seeking to keep U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton off the Nevada ballot with the argument that the U.S. Constitution prohibits a woman from holding the office.

Douglas Wallace, 80, contends that because the U.S. Constitution relies on the pronouns "he" and "his" in describing the duties of the president, no woman can hold the office.

Wallace argues the constitution would have to be amended to specifically allow a female president and accused Clinton of trying to make an "end run around the Constitution."

"The use of female gendered pronouns 'she' or 'her' are not present in the document, making it conclusive that the framers never intended that a woman would be president of the United States," Wallace wrote in the lawsuit.