A Fragment on Shall and May

Abstract:     
This short paper has some comments on the Constitution's use of the verbs "shall" and "may" (and "will"). We suggest that the American English of the founding generation was a more capacious language than its modern successor and that which came into being post-Noah Webster's first dictionary and grade school primer, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, first published in 1783. As we explain more fully, where a word once had multiple meanings, but only one variant is now remembered and understood, we may be seriously mistaken when we ascribe near certainty to our understanding of how a constitutional term was used.


The American Journal of Legal History is a peer reviewed journal which is available only on Westlaw.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

Keywords: shall, may, will, Constitution, Anglo-English, American-English, Madison

Accepted Paper Series