Kyraxius Trismegistus KC Majoris IMPORTANT THAT YOU READ THIS :) I have e-mailed you this read from my Yale Law Journal According to Jesse Sheidlower, a former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, “[I]t’s probably wrong, in almost all situations, to use a dictionary in the courtroom. Dictionary definitions are written with a lot of things in mind, but rigorously circumscribing the exact meanings and connotations of terms is not usually one of them.”5 Leading reference materials for lexicographers suggest that dictionaries are not definitive accounts of how words always are, or should be, used.6 Dictionaries, according to some who edit them, provide histories of how people have used words—not descriptions of complete meanings.7 5. nytimes/2011/06/14/us/14bar.html 6. See, e.g., B.T. Sue Atkins & Michael Rundell, The Oxford Guide to Practical Lexicography 45-48 (2008) (“A reliable dictionary is one whose generalizations about word behaviour approximate closely to the ways in which people normally use (and understand) language when engaging in real communicative acts . . . . [T]he job of the dictionary is to describe and explain linguistic conventions—the ways in which people generally use words – rather than trying to account for every individual language event.”). 7. Howard Jackson, Lexicography: An Introduction 87-92 (2002) Critics of court dictionary usage have raised a number of concerns about the manner in which Supreme Court Justices use dictionaries. First, Justices may quote selectively from a single dictionary entry. Instead of reporting all entries for a particular word in a single dictionary, a Justice may report the one entry for a word (in a list of five, six, seven, or more entries) that best supports the Justice’s preferred interpretation of a statute.8 Second, and relatedly, Justices may choose only dictionaries with definitions that support their preferred interpretation of a statute.9 This practice—called “dictionary shopping”—may disguise distortions of a word’s meaning as objective exercises in statutory interpretation.10 8. See James J. Brudney & Lawrence Baum, Oasis or Mirage: The Supreme Court’s Thirst for Dictionaries in the Rehnquist and Roberts Eras, 55 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 483, 566 (2013). Justices also accuse one another of citing definitions that are not the first-reported definition in the entry. Id. at 514. 9. Id. at 566 10. See William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Philip P. Frickey, Cases and Materials on Legislation: Statutes and the Creation of Public Policy 625-26 (2d ed. 1995); Ellen P. Aprill, The Law of the Word: Dictionary Shopping in the Supreme Court, 30 Ariz. St. L.J. 275, 281 (1998).
Posted on: Thu, 20 Nov 2014 17:10:37 +0000
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