Norton on Contesting “Address”: Conflicts Over the Words We Use To Address and Refer to Each Other

Helen L. Norton, University of Colorado Law School, has published Contesting ‘Address’: Conflicts Over the Words We Use to Address and Refer to Each Other at 62 Houston Law Review 799 (2025). Here is the abstract.

The words we use to address and refer to each other have the potential both to pull us closer together–and also to push us part. The power of address to reduce, as well as create, friction in human interactions sometimes triggers conflict over appropriate forms of address. This Commentary on Professor Richard Brooks’s Frankel Lecture examines some of these conflicts.

Some address conflicts involve debates over whether and when address actually makes meaning–or whether it’s instead relatively trivial. Others involve contestants who agree that address makes meaning in important ways, but disagree over what meaning should be made. Examples include not only gender-specific and racially subordinating forms of address but also the contested (for a time) choice of simply “President” for addressing the nation’s chief executive and commander in chief.

Address conflicts are sometimes resolved (if they are resolved) through social practice and sometimes through law. Legal efforts to resolve address conflicts sometimes involve addressees’ legal claim to control how they are addressed, and sometimes also involve addressers’ legal claim to control how they address others. In settings where the listener (the addressee) has less power than the speaker (the addresser), we can sometimes understand address as the speaker’s command about how the target should behave: to borrow legal scholar Kent Greenawalt’s vocabulary, speech sometimes does something, not just says something. In those settings, equality law recognizes that speech—including address—sometimes rises to the level of unlawful discriminatory conduct. Courts’ resolutions of address conflicts thus often turn on whether and when they understand the contested form of address to do something, and not just say something.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.