In Bostock v. Clayton County, the Supreme Court held that Title VII protects gay and transgender individuals from employment discrimination. Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch adhered to textualist principles and relied on the ordinary public meaning of the phrase “discriminate because of sex.” Despite the majority opinion purportedly not reaching beyond the words of the statute, three other conservatives on the Court accused Justice Gorsuch of legislating from the bench. Central to this Comment, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took exception with how Justice Gorsuch reached his ordinary meaning of the phrase. The debate between these two Justices can be characterized as a debate between semantics and pragmatics—two schools within the field of linguistics. Justice Gorsuch’s stringing together the precedent-defined meaning of the individual terms of the statute resembled semantics. Justice Kavanaugh’s reliance on considering the phrase as a whole and an examination of the broader societal and historical context resembled pragmatics.

This Comment proposes a sliding-scale approach that indicates when to move between semantics and pragmatics. What makes the scale slide is the pool of precedent, or the variability in how courts and their precedent have defined the words of a phrase. As the pool of precedent increases, the need to support a semantics-derived meaning of the phrase with pragmatics increases. To create a proxy for the variability of precedent-defined words, this Comment creates a tiered structure based on our court system’s hierarchy of precedent. By adopting this sliding-scale approach, courts will be able to interpret statutes while supporting textualism’s goal of judicial restraint.

在 博斯托克诉克莱顿县，最高法院认为，第七章保护同性恋和变性人免受就业歧视。Neil Gorsuch 法官为大多数人写作，坚持文本主义原则，并依赖“因性别歧视”一词的普通公众含义。尽管据称多数意见没有超出法规的规定，但法院的其他三名保守派指责戈萨奇法官在法官席上立法。本评论的核心是，布雷特·卡瓦诺大法官对戈萨奇大法官如何达到他对该短语的普通含义表示异议。这两位大法官之间的争论可以描述为语义学和语用学之间的争论——语言学领域内的两个流派。Gorsuch 法官将法规中各个术语的先例定义的含义串在一起，类似于语义。卡瓦诺大法官依赖于将这个短语作为一个整体来考虑，并对更广泛的社会和历史背景进行考察，这类似于语用学。

该评论提出了一种滑动尺度方法，指示何时在语义和语用之间移动。导致规模下滑的是先例池，或者法院及其先例如何定义一个短语的词的可变性。随着先例池的增加，需要用语用学来支持短语的语义衍生含义。为了创建判例定义词的可变性的代理，本评论根据我们法院系统的判例等级创建了一个分层结构。通过采用这种滑动尺度方法，法院将能够解释法规，同时支持文本主义的司法克制目标。