Statutory Construction Blog

New Article on Construction of Voter Initatives

Here you can find the abstract, only, of Solving the "Initiatory Construction" Puzzle (and Improving Direct Democracy) by Appropriate Refocusing on Sponsor Intent, by Professor Glenn Smith and published in the University of Colorado Law Review.

Tid bits

Senate Approves Many 9/11 Commission Recommendations; Bush Threatens Veto. Read about it here.

Open Government Week Brings Sunshine Bills to Light. Ugh. Can't believe I wrote that, but you can read about these federal bills here.

Judges Interested in More Sunshine, Too. The judicial conference has some proposals to put audio feeds on line, and to take other actions, according to this article.

More Judges Needed?

The Judicial Conference of the US voted to ask for 67 new judges (52 in the district courts), according to its press release.  A list of where they want them is here.

Bart Ehrman on Textual Interpretation

Please don't start here a debate on whether his conclusions about the New Testament are correct or not (there's a lot of that out there, and it's interesting, but not here, please!). I finished Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart D Ehrman. It's a discussion, in part, of the forensic and logical means by which scholars determine which version of competing texts of books of the Bible are more likely to be the original version (the "Autograph" in their parlance.)

Anyhow, at the very end, he makes these observations, which seemed fitting for a Sunday morning post:

After the years went by and I continued to study the text of the New Testament, I gradually became less judgmental toward the scribes who changed the scriptures they copied.... I slowly came to realize that what they were doing with the text was not all that different from what each of us does every time we read a text.

For the more I studied, the more I saw that reading a text necessarily involves interpreting a text. I suppose I when I started my studies I had a rather unsophisticated view of reading: that the point of reading a text is simply to let the text 'speak for itself;' to uncover the meaning inherent in its words. The reality, I came to see, is that meaning is not inherent and texts do not speak for themselves. If textx could speak for themselves, then everyone honestly and openly reading a text would agree on what the text says....