 It is controversial whether legal pragmatics is simply a part of the pragmatics of language use in general (see Dascal and Wróblewski 1988). It stands to reason that if the pragmatics of language use depends on the context of an utterance, the legal context of a lawmaking use of language will have implications for the meaning conveyed and, therefore, for the law that is made. Scott Soames has argued that the question of the relation between the content of the law and authoritative sources (such as statutes), is ‘an instance of the more general question of what determines the contents of ordinary linguistic texts’ (Soames 2008). It is a popular idea that when a legislature enacts a statute, ‘The content of the statute is what the lawmakers asserted and committed themselves to, in adopting the statutory language’ (Soames 2008). Speakers can commit themselves to something that they have not asserted, and can make assertions in contexts that make it clear that they are not committed to what they have asserted.