If you don’t want to hand a Kleenex to someone searching for a phone number, then you must read “Misreading Like a Lawyer: Cognitive Bias in Statutory Interpretation” by Jill Anderson.  Jill takes four interpretive settings, genocide in Rwanda, the destruction of records by Enron, voter impersonation, and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and shows how lawyers get readings wrong because we don’t understand opaque constructions. She then draws on the psycholinguistics literature to explain why we make these kinds of interpretive mistakes, time and again, and what might be done to save us from ourselves.  This is a seriously good piece.

You can find Jill at UConn Law.