Look It Up in Your Funk & Wagnalls: How Courts Define the Words of the Law

Abstract

ABSTRACT:American courts employ dictionaries more than ever to help them determine the meaning of words in the law. Judges are starting to explore the use of corpora and corpus linguistics to do so as well. Dictionaries both support and fail to support the complex process of legal interpretation. Judges accept or reject dictionary definitions or, in some cases, they select among conflicting definitions those that fit what they feel the outcome of the case should be. The growing interest in corpus linguistics may supplement the judicial reliance on dictionaries, but both dictionary definitions and corpus evidence require interpretation, a process that is inherently subjective. Although dictionaries have some drawbacks for legal work, courts are not likely to abandon them. Corpora present their own set of problems for legal interpretation, but they may eventually join dictionaries as fundamental, if imperfect, resources for the courts.