Goldfarb on Garner & Scalia on Interpretation

At LawNLinguistics, Neal Goldfarb has an ongoing multipart examination of Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts by Antonin Scalia & Bryan A. Garner.  Part 1 is a general introduction to the book.  Part 2, entitled “Prescriptivist statutory interpretation?” asks the question, “[T]o what extent is [Garner’s] background and expertise [as a language maven] actually relevant to the process of interpreting a text whose meaning is disputed?”  Part 3 provides some general background on syntactic ambiguity, as a lead-in to Part 4, which looks at the book’s treatment of several of the “syntactic canons of interpretation,”  including the Rule of the Last Antecedent.