Definition
A description of a thing by its properties, or an explanation of the meaning of a word or term. In legal contexts, definition operates both as a substantive concept — the act of fixing the scope and meaning of legal terms — and as a practical tool in drafting, interpretation, and statutory construction. Courts and legislatures rely on definitions to constrain or expand the reach of legal rules, and interpretive disputes frequently turn on whether a statutory or contractual definition controls over ordinary meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The concept of "definition" is foundational to legal research methodology, not merely a background term. In historical sources, definitional authority was often attributed to lexicographers — Black's 2nd Ed. cites Webster and Worcester by name — rather than to courts or legislatures, reflecting an older interpretive tradition that leaned on common usage as settled by dictionary authority. Researchers working in early American materials should be aware that courts of the nineteenth century regularly deferred to Webster's and Worcester's competing dictionaries as evidence of a term's ordinary meaning, a practice that continued well into the twentieth century before statutory definition sections became standard drafting practice. In modern materials, defined terms in statutes and contracts operate as technical overrides of ordinary meaning; a term formally defined in a statute means what the statute says it means, regardless of dictionary guidance. This shift is a persistent trap in cross-period research: a term that appears consistently across two centuries may carry entirely different legal weight depending on whether it is governed by a formal statutory definition or left to interpretive inference.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) Supplemental draws on two competing nineteenth-century authorities. The Webster formulation — "a description of a thing by its properties" — is ontological, concerned with capturing the essential nature of the thing being described. The Worcester formulation — "the process of stating the exact meaning of a word by means of other words" — is semantic, focused on linguistic substitution rather than real-world properties. The distinction matters: Webster's approach aligns with natural law and conceptualist legal thinking, while Worcester's anticipates the more positivist, text-centered approach that came to dominate statutory interpretation. Black's does not resolve the tension between these two formulations, which is itself instructive. The cases cited in the source entry — Warner v. Beers, Marvin v. State, and Mickle v. Miles — appear in the original Black's as illustrations of definitional disputes in practice, though researchers should verify current availability of these reporters independently.