Tillman, Seth Barrett and Tillman, Nora (2010) A Fragment on Shall and May. American Journal of Legal History, 50. p. 453. ISSN 0002-9319

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Abstract

This short paper has some comments on the Constitution's use of the verbs "shall" and "may" (and "will"). We suggest that the American English of the founding generation was a more capacious language than its modern successor and that which came into being post-Noah Webster's first dictionary and grade school primer, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, first published in 1783. As we explain more fully, where a word once had multiple meanings, but only one variant is now remembered and understood, we may be seriously mistaken when we ascribe near certainty to our understanding of how a constitutional term was used

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	shall; may; will; Constitution; Anglo-English; American-English; Madison;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Law
Item ID:	2896
Depositing User:	Seth Tillman
Date Deposited:	15 Dec 2011 12:15
Journal or Publication Title:	American Journal of Legal History
Refereed:	Yes
URI:
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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