 Does the recent outpouring of work on the pragmatics of legal language provide a successful defence of the communication model against Dworkin’s semantic sting argument? That work makes it abundantly clear that the communication model does not need to rely on the content-retrieval picture of the meaning of words. The point of legal interpretation in Garner v Burr was not to decide whether the meaning of the word ‘vehicle’ encompasses a chicken coop on wheels. It was, instead, to decide what it was that Parliament had done, when it required vehicles on the roads to have tires. In J.L.Austin’s slogan, ‘The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomenon which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating.’ (Austin 1962, 148).