What Justice Scalia’s King v. Burwell dissent gets wrong about words and meaning

Dissenting in the King v. Burwell case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia complained that “words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the state.’” This is an amusing piece of trolling, but the reality is that words have never “had meaning” in the way Scalia thinks.

Individual stringz of letterz r efforts to express meaningful propositions in an intelligible way. To succeed at this mission does not require the youse of any particular rite series of words and, in fact, a sntnce fll of gibberish cn B prfctly comprehensible and meaningful 2 an intelligent reader. To understand a phrse or paragraf or an entire txt rekwires the use of human understanding and contextual infrmation not just a dctionry.

That’s why the one-sentence version of John Roberts’s ruling seems compelling to everyone who understands the politics and policy around the Affordable Care Act. He is saying that you have to interpret the individual sections, subsections, clauses, and words of a statute as if you are an intelligent human being who is interpreting the work of other intelligent human beings, not just looking at a bunch of random marks on a piece of paper.

The letters “paragraf” in my paragraph above do not form a proper sentence of the English language. But the meaning of the sentence to understand a phrse or paragraf or an entire txt rekwires the use of human understanding and contextual infrmation not just a dctionry is clear despite the inclusion of many non-words. This is because meaning isn’t built from the ground up by assembling individual word-bits. It’s constructed holistically.