7.4.1 COMMON METHODS OF MAKING PLAIN LANGUAGE ARGUMENTS

At its foundational level, a plain language analysis means that the court will look at the words and sentences of the provision, noting how the subjects relate to the verbs, how the verbs relate to the objects, and how the modifiers relate to the words they modify.

If a particular term is in controversy, courts will first look for definitions within the statute, chapter, or code. If the term is not defined there (or if it is defined in a way that does not resolve the controversy), courts may look to outside definitions. Courts tend to look for the meaning of isolated words in a statute in one of three ways. First, if the term has a legal connotation, the court will likely look to a legal definition, particularly in Black’s Law Dictionary.¹² If the language does not have a legal connotation, or if it also has a nonlegal connotation, the court may consult a nonlegal dictionary. While the Oxford English Dictionary is an excellent source for British English, there is not a standard dictionary of American English that is the nonlegal equivalent to Black’s Law Dictionary. Thus, if you wish to cite a current dictionary to support an argument, you might look to recent opinions of the court to which you are arguing to see which dictionaries it cites when interpreting statutes. Finally, if the statute is an old one, and if the term’s meaning may have changed drastically since the statute’s enactment, the court might look for indicia of what the term meant when the statute was enacted. Legislatures that sought to regulate “speech” or even “telecommunication,” for example, might have had something very different in mind if they were acting before widespread use of the Internet. In making such an argument, you might look to a then-valid dictionary, or you might cite historical documents (including court decisions of the era) to evaluate what a term did or did not mean at the time in question.