Research

Directives and Intentions, 33 Nat. Lang. Semantics 255 (2025) (peer-reviewed)

I provide a unified pragmatic account of how expressions of varying grammatical forms (imperatives, modal and non-modal declaratives) can be used to tell people what to do, both directly and indirectly.

An Acceptable Theory of Reasonableness (draft available upon request)

Reasonableness standards in private law (found in negligence, premises liability, and bailments, among others) require only that conduct be acceptable. An agent acts reasonably even if they choose to do something suboptimal, provided they have a justification for it. In this paper, I show that legal reasonableness conforms to this structure of justified suboptimality across a variety of doctrinal areas. This changes how we should read the balancing tests that run through these doctrines: some factors do not put weights on the scale, and instead assign a party an entitlement to some imbalance in their favor.

Original Objective Meaning (draft available upon request)

Both textualism and its detractors conflate original understandings of meaning with original meaning itself. Drawing on the orthodoxy across theories of reference, on which meaning is an objective relation between words and the world, the paper poses a dilemma for textualist methodologies: they must choose between fidelity to objective textual meaning and deference to original public understanding. The upshot reaches beyond textualism. Since the meaning of referential terms like “sex” or “monopolize” depends partly on what their referents are actually like, every interpretive methodology must treat some questions about meaning as questions about the world.

The Language of Major Questions (draft available upon request)

This paper asks how far the major questions doctrine in administrative law can work as a linguistic canon consistent with textualism. I argue that the Court’s major questions jurisprudence exploits the context-dependence of the provisions it reads. The expressions at issue in these cases leave their content open without background information, and a statute supplies far thinner context than ordinary conversation. Filling those blanks requires a theory of how Congress communicates and delegates authority, so the doctrine cannot claim the autonomy from normative judgment that a fully linguistic canon would need.

The Law of Favors (in preparation)

Private law models a number of legal relationships on the moral economy of gratuity, in which one person acts for another’s benefit with no obligation to do so and nothing owed in return. Relationships of this shape carry a risk of subordination at both ends. The benefactor takes charge of part of another person’s interests (however minor), which leaves the beneficiary exposed. But the benefactor also acts unilaterally in service of ends other than their own, which without more undermines their status as an equal (however little). The law mirrors ordinary moral life in its answer to both risks. It demands active consideration for the beneficiary’s interests, from the gratuitous bailee’s duty of care to the fiduciary’s loyalty; and it grants the benefactor a return favor in the form of forbearance, lowering the standards of care to which an ungrateful beneficiary could otherwise hold them.