BYU Law Review Volume 2010 | Issue 5 Article 10 11-1-2010 The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning Stephen C. Mouritsen Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview Part of the Judges Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Stephen C. Mouritsen, The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning, 2010 BYU L. Rev. 1915 (2010). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol2010/iss5/10 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Brigham Young University Law Review at BYU Law Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in BYU Law Review by an authorized editor of BYU Law Digital Commons. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. DO NOT DELETE 2/16/2011 1:00 PM The Dictionary Is Not a Fortress: Definitional Fallacies and a Corpus-Based Approach to Plain Meaning [I]t is one of the surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress out of the dictionary. —Judge Learned Hand1 The judicial conception of lexical meaning—i.e., what judges think about what words mean, or, more importantly, how judges arrive at the meaning of contested terms—is often outcome determinative. Vast fortunes or years of confinement may balance precariously on the interpretation of a single word. When faced with hard cases2—cases in which contextual cues or legislative definitions do not decisively favor either party’s asserted meaning—judges, like many speakers of English, will cast about for interpretive tools, often “looking for comfortable reassurance” in one of the language’s “more firmly established and dependably stable institutions”—the English dictionary.3 Such dictionaries, said Justice Jackson, are “the last resort of the baffled judge.”4 Baffled or not, judges cannot escape the reverence with which society regards its dictionaries—a reverence that often borders on the devotional.5 Indeed, the dictionary is sometimes spoken of as a 1.