It seems to me, looking at the fantasy world our current SCOTUS lives in, they think much like this infamous character:

‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’
- Lewis Carrol, Through the Looking Glass
...

Yea, I love how they get magically confused when something says something they don’t want it to say.  5 years olds are masters at this.

I view it as in the same vein as a lot of legal thinking.  Essentially, a lot of lawyers posit there is some kind of objective legal test that can be called “the law” that a court can apply neutrally.  As opposed to a bunch of conflicting authority that can be used to justify the policy preferences of the judge trying the case.  As MikeEss says, it really is just another way to put an “objective” gloss on the judge’s/justice’s underlying policy preferences.  The real test would be if any judge followed the dictionary approach to a result he or she did not want to support on the merits, which I suspect are vanishingly rare if they exist at all.

It’s a lazy, faux-originalist way of figuring out the meaning of words without actually having to delve into what people actually think and how words are actually used.

I don’t get this.  Relying on the dictionary definition of words at least has the potential to get us to a progressive judgement.  Compared to the rest of Scalia’s ‘faint-hearted originialist’ thinking, it’s a boon.

“Suggestive of cherry-picking” is a really polite way to describe what’s so often going on. And of course this is pretty much clear because the whole bleeping edifice of law is built on using words to mean something other than what they mean in their everyday senses.

The most hilarious part about this is Thomas relies on the definition of “make” in light of yesterday’s NPR story about the writing practices of the Supreme Court:

Thomas says he never even sees a draft until it has been through three aggressive rewrites by his law clerks.

Even though several subordinates did all the work, Thomas “made” the ruling.

Okay, I agree with the statement, “Dictionaries aren’t meant to be prescriptive, they’re meant to be descriptive.” But in this case it just seems to be two sides of the same coin. After all, if you want to know “how words are actually used,” well, that’s what a dictionary describes. The main drawbacks there are a) the amount of time it takes for dictionary definitions to be updated and b) inevitable biases on the part of the lexicographers.

But I don’t understand how you’re supposed to weigh how words are actually used without some sort of objective referent. If you have two opposing parties sitting in front of you in your court and you ask them how they intended the words to be interpreted, obviously they’re just going to tell you something favorable to their case. So what’s the use?

Okay, scratch “objective” (in light of the inevitable biases I mentioned) and replace it with something like “third-party.”

The problem with the third-party referent is that you’re still looking to how some other party decided to rank both the most common uses of the word and the most acceptable uses.  It’s not just an abdication of interpretive responsibility, it’s an endorsement of what even dictionary writers admit is an often-arbitrary system.

This is where you look to other actual uses of the word, say in similar contracts or in similar courses of dealing.  It’s not perfect, but it at least requires you to look at how the word is actively used rather than hoping the judge uses the OED rather than Merriam-Webster to look up the definition of “car”.

It’s just another way for them to twist things so that they end up the way they want them.  The only way they can win is by cheating, and they know it.  “Just call balls and strikes.” Right.  Liars.

The wielding of dictionary definitions as if they were some kind of authority on what words “really” mean as Dictated From On High By The Language Gods has long been one of my peeves (with me being a linguist), but this one case is particularly insane:

WASHINGTON — In a decision last week in a patent case, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. puzzled out the meaning of a federal law by consulting the usual legal materials — and five dictionaries.

One of the words he looked up was “of.” He learned that it means pretty much what you think it means.

Um, “of” is a a function word.  It doesn’t have a “meaning” in the sense that a content word like “dog” does.  A function word is a word that the syntax of a language requires in some grammatical construction.  And function words are commonly multifunctional—the same content word will appear in multiple constructions that have different meanings. 

And don’t get me started on ordinary terms that have highly technical senses in a specialized field. I just checked two dictionaries’ definitions of “computable,” and neither mentions Turing machines.  (And they shouldn’t; the point is not that the dictionary is wrong, the point is that the dictionary is not supposed to be a Computer Science book, much less an “every damn topic” book!)

Comment #7: Triplanetary on 06/14 at 02:07 PM

But I don’t understand how you’re supposed to weigh how words are actually used without some sort of objective referent. If you have two opposing parties sitting in front of you in your court and you ask them how they intended the words to be interpreted, obviously they’re just going to tell you something favorable to their case. So what’s the use?

The problem isn’t with consulting third party sources to settle disputes.  The problem is, again, treating the dictionary as if it was an magical book that gives you the “true” meaning of words, instead of treating it as one tool among many that can be used to determine what it means to use a particular use of a word in particular context.  The adjudication of the dispute over the meaning should not use its tools uncritically.

sacundim, 11:

I just checked two dictionaries’ definitions of “computable,” and neither mentions Turing machines.  (And they shouldn’t; the point is not that the dictionary is wrong, the point is that the dictionary is not supposed to be a Computer Science book, much less an “every damn topic” book!)

Maybe they should use Wikipedia instead.

It almost sounds like they’re taking a page from the sovereign citizen movement, which just loves obsessing over dictionary definitions.

And it is funny you should mention prescriptivism vs. descriptivism. Most of the (ahem) grammar Nazis out there, at least the prominent ones like William Safire, are either conservatives or act like them, and they’re also the same people that throw shitfits every time the OED adds words like “bootylicious” to the dictionary. (I think this also applies to language regulators like the Académie Française—I recently read that they’re among the more vocal opponents of France recognizing its diverse minority languages, including Occitan, which has a long and distinguished history of its own.) In fact I still remember the shitstorm over Webster’s Third International’s 1993 revision.

Truth is, dictionary-based arguments are only quasi-helpful at best…