Author archives

Eric Goldman is a Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. He also co-directs the school’s High Tech Law Institute and supervises the school’s Privacy Law Certificate. Before joining the SCU faculty in 2006, he was an Assistant Professor at Marquette University Law School, General Counsel of Epinions.com, and an Internet transactional attorney at Cooley Godward LLP. Eric teaches and publishes in the areas of Internet Law, Intellectual Property and Advertising & Marketing Law. He blogs on these topics at the Technology & Marketing Law Blog, which has been inducted into the ABA Journal’s “Blawg Hall of Fame.” The California State Bar’s IP Section has named him an “IP Vanguard,” and Managing IP magazine twice named him to a shortlist of “IP Thought Leaders” in North America. Eric received his BA, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, in Economics/Business from UCLA in 1988. He received his JD from UCLA in 1994, where he was a member of the UCLA Law Review, and concurrently received his MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.

Emojis Have Unsettled Grammar Rules (and Why Lawyers Should Care)

Eric Goldman discusses a new article by three Dutch researchers on the grammar of emojis, or more precisely, the lack thereof. Their abstract concludes: “while emoji may follow tendencies in their interactions with grammatical structure in multimodal text-emoji productions, they lack grammatical structure on their own.” Goldman states, in other words, when emoji symbols are strung together, we don’t have a reliable way of interpreting their meaning. He goes on to discuss the impact of emojis and the law.

Subjects: Intellectual Property, KM, Legal Research