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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, June 13 2012 @ 12:26 PM EDT |
You're making a distinction without a difference. We agree
that it's the legal meaning that matters. As a general
rule, the legal meaning is the meaning that was in the
lawmaker's mind. If a word has multiple definitions,
lawyers look to context to figure out which meaning was
intended. If a lawmaker didn't know or understand one
meaning, that's not the meaning they meant. I guarantee you
that nobody on the Supreme Court read or understood the
books that PolR drew on in writing his two long articles.
They meant "math" in an ordinary sense, even if it's not the
same as the mathematical sense.
Furthermore, lawyers like to look to results to check
whether their interpretations are correct. If the Supreme
court has said math is not patentable, and has also upheld
software patents, then lawyers will conclude that the Court
had in mind a definition of math that doesnt' include
software. (A lawyer will never argue to a lower court that
the Supreme Court is wrong.) So you'll never win an
argument with a lawyer if you just talk about definitions.
You have to get at intent: *why* is math not patentable?
It's clearly a "useful art"... is it because it's not
physical? Now we're getting somewhere...
In practice, sometimes a term gets reinterpreted by a later
Court in a way that clearly differs from the original
lawmaker's understanding. But this reinterpretation is
always cloaked in the fiction of understanding the
lawmaker's intent, even if the supposed intent contradicts
the plain meaning of the lawmaker's language.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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