Ordinary meaning in common law legal interpretation
Judges in the United States frequently appeal to the concept of “ordinary meaning” when tasked with
interpreting legal texts. Yet U.S. judges lack a shared, coherent definition of what “ordinary meaning” actually means
and they lack a shared, coherent method for discovering “ordinary meaning”. This chapter addresses some of the ways
that U.S. judges characterize “ordinary meaning”. It also discusses how judges go about searching for “ordinary
meaning.” The chapter also proposes that legal interpreters should place more reliance in usage evidence when tasked
with interpreting a legal text and finding its “ordinary meaning”.
Article outline
- 1.Why ordinary meaning?
- 2.What is ordinary meaning?
- 2.1Context, speech community, and timeframe
- Linguistic context
- Timeframe
- Ordinary meaning and speech community
- 3.Finding ordinary meaning
- 3.1Linguistic intuition
- 3.2Dictionaries and the “Baffled Judge”
- 4.Evaluating ordinary meaning claims with linguistic corpora
- 5.Limitations and future work
- 6.Conclusions
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Notes
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References