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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: | https://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/id/eprint/2896 |
| 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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