Definition
To construe a legal instrument is to determine its meaning by analyzing, arranging, and reasoning from its language. The act of construing involves more than reading words in isolation — it requires marshaling the text as a whole, identifying the relationships among its parts, and drawing inferences about the drafter's intent. In legal usage, "construe" describes what courts and practitioners do when they interpret a contract, statute, will, deed, or other document whose meaning is disputed or uncertain.
Construing is closely associated with the broader discipline of legal construction, which provides the rules and principles that guide the interpretive process. Where the plain meaning of language is clear, little construction is required. Where language is ambiguous, conflicting, or incomplete, construing the instrument demands a more searching examination of context, purpose, and governing interpretive canons.
---
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): To understand something as having a particular meaning; to interpret or explain language, especially grammatically; to translate; to infer.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): To apply the rules of syntax to a sentence so as to exhibit its structure and discover its sense; to put a construction upon words; to interpret or explain.
In common usage, "construe" and "interpret" are essentially interchangeable, and the word carries a neutral, grammatical flavor — the act of parsing or explaining language generally. In legal usage, a meaningful distinction sometimes emerges: "construe" often signals a deliberate, rule-governed process of assembling a text's meaning from its parts, while "interpret" may refer more broadly to determining intent. The distinction is not uniformly observed, and many courts and writers use the terms synonymously, but researchers working with historical legal sources should be alert to contexts where "construe" carries the more technical sense of applying formal rules of construction.
---
Common Confusion
CONSTRUE vs. INTERPRET: These words overlap so substantially in legal writing that courts frequently use them interchangeably. Some treatise writers and courts have attempted a distinction — reserving "interpret" for finding the meaning of words and "construe" for determining legal effect once meaning is established — but this distinction is not consistently maintained and should not be assumed when reading historical sources. When a court says it is "construing" a document, it may mean anything from parsing the grammar of a clause to resolving a fundamental question of legal effect.
CONSTRUE vs. CONSTRUCTION: "Construe" is the verb; "construction" is the noun describing both the act and the resulting interpretation. Historical legal dictionaries often cross-reference one to the other. A researcher encountering the directive to "see Construction" (as in Black's 2nd Ed.) will find the substantive principles — strict and liberal construction, rules of construction — organized under that heading rather than here.
---
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research value of understanding "construe" is navigational: it is a gateway term pointing to the substantive doctrine housed under CONSTRUCTION. Historical legal dictionaries treat "construe" briefly and functionally, consistently directing readers to Construction for the operative principles. Researchers who encounter "construe" in case law or older legal writing and seek the governing rules should follow that cross-reference.
Timing matters. Interpretive philosophy has shifted substantially across legal history. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century courts and commentators often approached construction with strict formalism — particularly in construing statutes in derogation of the common law or penal statutes against the government. Modern courts are more likely to employ purposivist or textualist frameworks depending on jurisdiction and document type. The verb "construe" appearing in an 1850 opinion and the same verb in a 2005 opinion may reflect fundamentally different interpretive commitments.
Instrument type controls the rules applied. Courts construe contracts differently from statutes, statutes differently from constitutional provisions, and wills differently from deeds. Historical sources sometimes conflate these contexts; a researcher should identify what type of instrument is being construed before applying any given rule encountered in older materials.
In corpus research, "construe strictly" and "construe liberally" are high-frequency phrases in historical case law and carry specific doctrinal content. "Strictly construed" typically signals that ambiguity is resolved against extension of a power or liability; "liberally construed" signals that ambiguity is resolved in favor of the instrument's remedial purpose. Tracking how these phrases attach to particular instrument types across time is a productive research path.
---
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's (1st and 2nd Ed.) and Burrill are in close agreement, almost verbatim: to construe is "to put together; to arrange or marshal the words of an instrument" and "to ascertain the meaning of language by a process of arrangement and inference." Burrill traces the word to the Latin construere, which fits the grammatical-assembly sense common to all three sources. Both editions of Black's cross-reference Construction, confirming that "construe" functions as a procedural descriptor while the substantive doctrine lives elsewhere.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is notable. None of them explores the distinction between construing different instrument types, the interpretive canons that govern the process, or the philosophical tension between strict and liberal construction that pervades nineteenth-century American jurisprudence. A researcher relying solely on these entries for guidance on how to construe a document will need to move immediately to Construction, and from there to the relevant treatise literature.
Webster's 1913 is genuinely useful here as a gloss: the grammatical sense of construing — applying rules of syntax to exhibit structure and discover sense — maps cleanly onto the legal definition. Legal construction is, at its core, a disciplined version of the same process applied to instruments with legal consequences.
---
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia: Construction of Instruments; Statutory Interpretation; Rules of Construction.
---