Nora Tillman and Seth Barrett Tillman (United States District Court, NJ) has posted A Fragment on Shall and May (American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 50, p. 453, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This short paper has some comments on the Constitution's use of the verbs "shall" and "may" (and "will"). We suggest that the American English of the founding generation was a more capacious language than its modern successor and that which came into being post-Noah Webster's first dictionary and grade school primer, A Grammatical Institute of the English Language, first published in 1783. As we explain more fully, where a word once had multiple meanings, but only one variant is now remembered and understood, we may be seriously mistaken when we ascribe near certainty to our understanding of how a constitutional term was used.
Posted at 12:25 AM