Many questions of legal interpretation hinge on whether two groups of people assign different meanings to the same word. For example: Do 18th- and 21st-century English speakers assign the same meaning to commerce? Do judges and laypersons agree on what makes conduct reasonable? We propose a new statistical test to answer such questions. In three applications, we use our test to (1) quantify differences in the meanings of specialized words from civil procedure, (2) identify statistically significant differences between judges and laypersons’ understandings of reasonable and consent, and (3) assess differences across various effort standards in commercial contracts (phrases like best effort and good faith effort). Our approach may be readily applied outside the law to quantify semantic disagreements between or within groups. (JEL C10, C12, C55, K12, K41).

中文翻译：

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法律解释的统计检验：理论与应用

法律解释的许多问题取决于两组人是否对同一个词赋予不同的含义。例如： 18 世纪和 21 世纪的英语使用者是否对商业赋予相同的含义？法官和非专业人士是否就行为合理的原因达成一致？我们提出了一个新的统计测试来回答这些问题。在三个应用程序中，我们使用我们的测试来（1）量化民事诉讼中专业词含义的差异，（2）确定法官和非专业人士对合理和同意的理解之间的统计显着差异，以及（3）评估各种差异商业合同中的努力标准（诸如尽力而为和真诚努力之类的短语）。我们的方法可以很容易地在法律之外应用，以量化组之间或组内的语义分歧。（JEL C10、C12、C55、K12、