Marquette Law Review Article Sparks Debate on Use of Dictionaries to Decide Legal Cases
A recent article in the Marquette Law Review was featured in Adam Liptak’s “Sidebar” column for the New York Times earlier this week. Liptak wrote about the increasingly common citation of dictionaries in Supreme Court opinions:
A new study in The Marquette Law Review found that the justices had used dictionaries to define 295 words or phrases in 225 opinions in the 10 years starting in October 2000. That is roughly in line with the previous decade but an explosion by historical standards. In the 1960s, for instance, the court relied on dictionaries to define 23 terms in 16 opinions.
Liptak notes various objections to the practice. For instance, dictionaries were not written for the purpose of supplying precise legal definitions, and the variety of different meanings suggested by the many available dictionaries creates opportunities for “cherry picking.” He adds,
The authors of the Marquette study, Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier and Samuel A. Thumma, said the justices had never really said precisely what dictionary definitions were doing in legal opinions. They urged the justices to explain “when and how dictionaries should be used, how a specific dictionary should be chosen and how to use a dictionary for interpretation.”