Michael B.W. Sinclair

Professor of Law

A former linguistics scholar, Michael B.W. Sinclair views the ability to write clearly as a central attribute of any legal career.

“You have to be able to parse sentences to make arguments,” he explains. “After all, a statute is only a sentence with a special pedigree.”

Professor Sinclair has written extensively about the judicial reading of legislation, producing a book on the subject, A Guide to Statutory Interpretation (Lexis Publishing, 2000). In what has become an increasingly controversial legal area, he disagrees with what he terms a “one-size-fits-all strategy” of statutory interpretation and argues instead for varying approaches that take the history, context, and purpose of a legislative enactment into account.

An admitted generalist, Professor Sinclair has written in the areas of contracts, commercial law, intellectual property, banking, feminist theory, jurisprudence, common law, legal method, and payment systems.

Originally from New Zealand, Professor Sinclair took his B.A. (First Class in Philosophy) and his Ph.D. (Philosophy) at Victoria University of Wellington. Then he met an American woman in New Zealand, fell in love, and with the help of a Fulbright Fellowship was able to follow her to the United States in 1974 for postdoctoral work in linguistics. They were and still are married and she is now a professor of anthropology. He obtained his J.D. magna cum laude in 1978 from the University of Michigan Law School. From 1978 to 1981, he was in private practice with Dickinson Wright Moon VanDusen & Freeman in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, specializing in commercial litigation, finance, and municipal bonds.

After serving as a visiting lecturer at the University of Michigan in linguistics and the University of Massachusetts in logic, Professor Sinclair was asssistant professor at the School of Law at Indiana University from 1981 to 1988. He joined the New York Law School faculty in 1988. He has taught Jurisprudence, Contracts, Commercial Law, Copyright, Legal Method, Payment Systems, Banking, Agency and Partnership, and Wills and Trusts, and now teaches Administrative Law, Legislation, Statutory Interpretation, and Torts.

He brings to teaching a commitment to linguistic accuracy, a commitment he is determined to pass on to his students.

“The precise and effective use of words is what lawyers are supposed to be good at,” he points out.