Noncompositional

Ah, the law. You know, they’ve got a lot of words in there, and if people who write laws (or legally-binding documents) aren’t careful, the pristine, unambiguous, straightforward language of the law could get contaminated by the ugliness of conventional meanings, like conventional connotations and Gricean implicature. But surely no one, least of all honored lawyers, would exploit a brief lapse of judgement of a law-writer to maneuver themselves into an advantageous position. Surely…

An article in Saturday’s issue of the Wall Street Journal tells the story of one Victor Washington, former NFL athlete, who after several years in the game, left the league due mostly to continuous knee problems. He filed for disability benefits:

Mr. Washington filed his claim in May 1983. Orthopedists hired by the NFL plan enumerated his painful problems, such as arthritis, degenerative joint disease and an inability to fully extend one knee. A Rutgers University professor of psychiatry hired by the NFL wrote — according to later court files — that depression and difficulty with concentration, “combined with his physical injury and significant pain (both knee and back) indeed render him disabled by his football related injuries.”

However, the commission in charge of deciding whether to grant disability payments, which can go up to $4000 per month, decided that the injuries were not football-related, and gave him a $750/mo benefit. He appealed, the NFL had him examined again, with the same results. This time the commission was tied 3-3, so they went to an arbitrator.

With the trustees deadlocked, the decision went to an arbitrator, who a year later noted the plan’s definition of a football-related disability as the result of “a football injury.” Focusing on the word “a,” the arbitrator said this meant it must be from a single injury. Because Mr. Washington had several, the arbitrator ruled in 1986, he wasn’t eligible for the higher benefits. Based on this interpretation, the NFL plan denied the claims of several other former players that were pending at the time.

Wow. That’s one clever arbitrator. He must have taken the quantificational use of “a” quite seriously - for him (or at least the very clever side of him), it means exactly a…er, that is, exactly one. Of course, sometimes in natural language people do mean it to mean that. If you want “an ice cream cone,” you just want one (and you also want ice cream in it, but never mind that), and if you “saw a strange bird on the way to the forum,” many reasonable people will assume you just saw the one.

But what if you’ve got some sort of modal involved? I’m sure we’ve all thought at one point that if “you must be 18 to order,” then what do all the poor 19-year-olds do? (You have thought that at one point, right?) But clearly many older people somehow get past the phone operators. Similarly, if you “must have a doctoral degree” to apply for a job, all of those with PhDs in both Comparative Slavic Folklore and Mathematics had better just give up — they’ll be rejected out of hand.

Now, there are some less clear cases: if a sign says “you must be holding three batons to enter the room,” maybe it’s not so unreasonable to turn back people with five or six. I don’t know how the relevant condition was phrased in the documents the arbitrator was looking at. If it had something like “only parties diagnosed with a football-related disability, where a football-related disability is one that results from a football injury,” well…it’s hard to say. What if one injury totally disabled them, but there were other injuries? This seems legit. What if no single injury took someone out of play, but the combination of three, over time, did? It seems reasonable to me to say this qualifies for benefits, but then I’m just a liberal linguist. (I’m not up on the literature of exactly when these Quantity implicatures happen (or which way they happen), so maybe there is an “answer,” though it still wouldn’t tell us what the arbitrator was basing his ruling on) Nonetheless, this definitely looks like a case of conventions of language improperly dirtying the waters of the otherwise pristine landscape of legal language.

The story continues. There was a reworking of the rules for applying, Washington applied, was denied, then later settled for $400,000 in back payments. Then, in 2001…

Mr. Washington learned about the case of another ex-player who’d also been told his disability wasn’t football-related because it stemmed from more than one injury. That player, Donald Brumm, had sued, and in 1993 an appellate court declared the NFL’s decision to deny benefits arbitrary and capricious. Said the Eighth Circuit Court in Minneapolis: “To require that a disability result from a single, identifiable football injury when the relevant plan language speaks of `a football injury while an active player’ is to place undue and inappropriate emphasis on the word `a.’ “

To finish the story, he sued, the judge found in his favor, set the settlement aside, and demanded the NFL consider him for benefits again. They haven’t decided yet, but they may again deny the payments: and better yet, may end up demanding the $400,000 back, with interest.