No use of language, regardless of how much care is taken in crafting a phrase, is unambiguous or immune to (mis)interpretation. Although he wrote much of the United States Constitution, James Madison still argued that the meaning of laws in the new republic could not be fixed with certainty until they were contested and discussed. All laws, he wrote, regardless of how finely worded, ‘are considered more or less obscure and equivocal’ until they are interpreted.
