The Semantics of Sleeping in Railway Stations

Abstract

Every student of legal interpretation knows about H.L.A. Hart’s no-vehicles-in-the-park thought experiment, which Hart used to illustrate his argument that the words in which a law is written will have “a core of settled meaning” but that there will also be “a penumbra of debatable cases in which words are neither obviously applicable nor obviously ruled out.” That distinction was challenged by Lon Fuller, who denied the existence of any core area in which the law’s applicability was clear; for Fuller, the law’s applicability turned not on semantics but on the law’s purpose.

To support his argument, Fuller offered two hypothetical of his own, one of which is the subject of this paper. Fuller posits a law making it illegal “to sleep in any railway station.” He then supposes that two people have been arrested for violating this law: one who dozed off while waiting for a train, and another “who had brought a blanket and pillow to the station and had obviously settled himself down for the night[,]” but who had been arrested before he fell asleep. “Which of these cases,” Fuller asked, “presents the ‘standard instance’ of the word ‘sleep’?” And would it be faithful to the law to say that the law had been violated by the second person but not the first?

The hypothetical is thought-provoking because applying what is assumed to be the literal meaning of the law — that it prohibits being asleep in a railway station — yields a conclusion that seems nonsensical: that the law was violated by the dozing passenger but not by the person who was bedded down but still awake. Nevertheless, that assumption about the law’s literal meaning has been accepted by scholars such as Kent Greenawalt, Fred Schauer, Scott Soames, and Andrei Marmor. As Schauer put it, “Sleep is a physiological state, and as a matter of physiology Fuller’s businessman was sleeping. Period.”

The assumption about the law’s literal meaning is itself based on an assumption — namely, that the issue turns on the meaning of “sleep.” In this paper, I challenge both of those assumptions. I will argue that the focus should be on the meaning of “sleep in a railway station” (and more generally, on phrases following the pattern “sleep in [a location]”). And having reframed the issue in that way, I draw on corpus data to examine how such phrases are used. As I will show, it is entirely consistent with actual usage to interpret “sleep in a railway station” to mean ‘use a railway station as a place to sleep’ rather than ‘be asleep in a railway station.’

Keywords: legal interpretation, corpus linguistics

JEL Classification: K10, K40