Contesting "Address": Conflicts Over the Words We Use to Address and Refer to Each Other

Authors

Helen Norton, University of Colorado Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Response or Comment

Publication

Houston Law Review

Year

2025

Citation Information

Helen Norton, Contesting "Address": Conflicts Over the Words We Use to Address and Refer to Each Other, 62 Hous. L. Rev. 799 (2025), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1685.

Abstract

Professor Richard Brooks's generative insights provide us with valuable tools for recognizing, and trying to make sense of, address's role in human interactions. That "address"--the words we use to address and refer to each other--has the potential both to offer value and to inflict harm to these interactions sometimes triggers conflict over appropriate forms of address. In this Commentary to Professor Brooks's Frankel Lecture, I examine some of these conflicts.

As we'll see, some address conflicts involve debates over whether and when address actually makes meaning or whether it’s instead relatively trivial--while 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 (for a time) contested 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, more specifically, 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.

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