A Georgetown team of two linguists and a law professor celebrated an achievement at the Supreme Court after their amicus (“friend of the court”) brief was cited in the 7-to-2 majority opinion.
The case, Bondi v. VanDerStok, was brought by gun manufacturers in response to a Biden-era regulation concerning gun parts kits. These kits can be assembled into what are commonly known as “ghost guns” because the weapons are untraceable.
The justices confronted the question of whether the gun parts kits fall under the scope of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the federal law regulating the trade of firearms.
“If the answer is no, that poses serious gun safety challenges, because someone who wouldn’t be able to purchase a fully functional firearm could purchase a gun parts kit and obtain a fully functional firearm in a day’s work,” said Kevin Tobia, professor at Georgetown Law.
In an amicus brief, the Georgetown team used linguistic concepts and research to argue that gun parts kits do fall under the definition of a firearm — and can thus be regulated under existing federal firearms legislation.
Tobia co-authored the amicus brief with two colleagues in the College of Arts & Sciences: Nathan Schneider, associate professor of linguistics and computer science, and Brandon Waldon, a postdoctoral fellow with the Fritz Family Fellowship in Tech & Society that promotes interdisciplinary research. Collaborators from Stanford University and Brandeis University also contributed to the amicus brief.
Writing for the majority in March, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch upheld the regulation on ghost guns, requiring gun parts kits to undergo the same regulations as fully assembled firearms, including serial numbers and background checks.
Learn more about how the Georgetown team made linguistics a key part of the Supreme Court decision.
The Linguistics Behind Firearms
The co-authors centered their argument around the linguistic concept of artifact nouns.
Artifact nouns refer to objects that are human-made or are used for specific human purposes, Waldon said.
In the amicus brief, the team argues that “firearm” is an artifact noun, which allows it to be interpreted broadly in terms of not just a firearm’s physical form but also its intended use. In other words, the co-authors argue that a gun parts kit intended to be assembled into a functioning firearm is already a firearm.
“Two key parts of artifact nouns are their form and function. We think the statute highlights the function aspect,” Schneider said. “It is appropriate to interpret a gun parts kit as falling within the scope of the term ‘firearm’ because its potential function is very much that of the function of an already assembled firearm.”
Although the 1968 law predated modern gun parts kits, the way it defines “firearm” is broad enough to encompass these products and accords with common usage of the term, the researchers argue.
“There’s nothing necessarily contrived or artificial about the statutory definition of a firearm. This is a natural way we could interpret that word in many contexts,” Waldon said. “The statutory definition is just giving us all of the ingredients that we need to interpret the noun firearm in one of many different ways we could interpret the word.”
In their article published in the Harvard Journal on Legislation, the Georgetown team analyzed the product pages of gun parts kits. They found some vendors described their kits as firearms, undermining the claims of the gun manufacturers who challenged the federal regulation.
The researchers also surveyed a representative sample of 1,200 Americans. Survey participants were given the legal definition of a firearm and a description of a gun parts kit. The survey asked the participants whether they believed a gun parts kit fits the definition of a firearm.
In the survey, a majority of participants responded that a gun parts kit should be considered a firearm when given the Gun Control Act of 1968’s definition of a firearm.
“The survey confirms that our conclusion as linguists is supported by the interpretive intuitions of ordinary Americans who don’t have the same kind of linguistic expertise or legal background that the players in this case necessarily had,” Waldon said.
The Future of Linguistics in the Courts
Despite the pivotal role of linguistics in this Supreme Court case, Supreme Court amicus briefs more commonly draw on other fields, such as history, Tobia said.
The team at Georgetown hopes to change that.
Over the last few years, the Georgetown researchers have made linguistics more visible at the highest levels of the legal system. Last year, Tobia co-authored an amicus brief that was cited in the dissenting opinion in Pulsifer v. United States. He and Schneider also co-authored a Columbia Law Review article that applied linguistics to evaluate how a district court had engaged in statutory interpretation. Waldon also previously contributed to a linguistics amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court.
The three researchers hope this latest victory at the Supreme Court will further elevate linguistics in the legal field.
“A big motivation of the project was to correct that imbalance,” Tobia said. “If the courts are approaching these interpretive questions as textualist questions that are fundamentally questions of linguistics, it’s useful to have some linguistic expertise presented to the court.”
Schneider said he never would have imagined his career in computational linguistics would lead to being cited in a Supreme Court decision. He hopes this will be the first step to include more linguistic arguments in court cases.
“My hope is that other judges and advocates will read this opinion and recognize that there can be some systematic thinking about language in a context that draws on different sources of evidence. Not simply looking up a word in the dictionary, because dictionary definitions are not perfect, but looking carefully at the structure of a statute and empirical data of how ordinary speakers might interpret the word in context,” Schneider said
From his perspective as a legal scholar, Tobia expressed his hope that this case will encourage linguists to lend their expertise to future interpretation cases. Waldon, for his part, intends to seek out further opportunities to have such an impact.
“It’s one thing for linguists to be passive observers of legal interpretation as it’s happening in the courts. It’s another thing to actually be able to leverage linguistic insights and construct arguments in the context of this textualist paradigm that will be compelling to the Supreme Court,” Waldon said.
“This decision is reason for some cautious optimism that there could be an opportunity in the coming years for linguists to provide more empirically informed formal guidance to the courts for how to resolve some of these hard cases of interpretation.”
