When Judges Use the Dictionary

Abstract

I HAVE A VAGUE MEMORY OF MISSPELLING view in elementary school and being told by my teacher to look it up in the dictionary. I couldn't find it. Unsympathetic as she was, the teacher eventually broke down and gave me the spelling. Her more or less religious attitude towards dictionaries was not lost on me, however. To the extent I was able, I regularly and obediently turned to the dictionary, which, often enough, taught me very little apart from how to write word. I expect that most people had childhood dictionary experiences much like mine. Linguists and psychologists of language now know enough about the psychology of word knowledge to shed some light on what dictionaries can do and what they cannot do. But our society's reverence for dictionaries is not driven by the latest discoveries in psycholinguistic research. Rather, it is deeply embedded in our culture. Samuel Johnson in his 1755 dictionary defined lexicographer as a writer of dictionaries; harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words (quoted in McAdam and Milne 1963, 233). Yet we commonly ignore the fact that someone sat there and wrote the dictionary which is on our desk, and we speak as though there were only one dictionary, whose lexicographer got all the definitions right in some sense that defies analysis. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that judges often turn to the dictionary to find support for their decisions (see, e.g., Robinson 1982; Bailey 1984). That is, judges actually use the dictionary as an authority for deciding that one party should win instead of another. This sort of reliance on dictionaries has its problems, which have not gone unnoticed. Close to 50 years ago, Judge Learned Hand wrote, in much-quoted passage: