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In:Handbook of Terminology: Volume 3. Legal Terminology
Edited by Łucja Biel and Hendrik J. Kockaert
[Handbook of Terminology 3] 2023
► pp. 72–89

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Ordinary meaning in common law legal interpretation

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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC BY-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 1 December 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/hot.3.ord1
Abstract
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
  • Notes
  • References
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