Definition
"Gon" does not appear as a standalone legal term in the established canon of Anglo-American law. The source material attributed to this entry — a passage from Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) at II. 372 — concerns the doctrine of liberal construction of statutes, not a term called "gon." The passage reads in part: "Liberal construction... expands the meaning of the statute to meet cases which are clearly within the spirit or reason of the law, or within the evil which it was designed to remedy, provided such an interpretation is not inconsistent with the language used; it resolves all reasonable doubts in favor of the applicability of the statute to the particular case."
It is most likely that "GON" is a truncation, OCR error, or indexing artifact — possibly derived from a longer term such as CONSTRUCTION (LIBERAL), GOING, or a fragment of another entry. No recognized legal term "gon" exists in Black's, Bouvier's, Burrill's, or standard common law dictionaries.
Common Confusion
Do not treat "GON" as a recognized legal term. It should not be cited, defined, or relied upon as such. Any legal proposition drawn from the accompanying source passage should be attributed to the doctrine of LIBERAL CONSTRUCTION or STATUTORY CONSTRUCTION, not to a term called "gon."
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in digitized historical legal dictionaries will frequently encounter corrupted or truncated headwords produced by optical character recognition (OCR) errors, damaged page scans, or faulty indexing. "GON" is almost certainly one such artifact. The underlying source passage is substantively important — it defines liberal (or broad) statutory construction, a foundational concept in statutory interpretation — but the headword is unreliable.
If you arrived here seeking the doctrine described in the source passage, see the entries for CONSTRUCTION, LIBERAL CONSTRUCTION, and STRICT CONSTRUCTION. Those entries contain the substantive legal content that this passage was intended to support.
If you are a corpus researcher: treat any short, vowel-light headword (two to four characters, no recognized legal meaning) appearing in digitized sources as a candidate OCR artifact before treating it as a genuine term of art. Cross-reference the page number and surrounding context in the original printed volume.
Historical Dictionary Support
The passage preserved under this headword accurately reflects the Black's Law Dictionary (2nd Ed.) treatment of liberal construction. Black's distinguishes liberal construction from strict construction on the axis of legislative purpose: liberal construction permits a court to extend statutory language to cases within the spirit of the law even when those cases are not explicitly named, so long as the extension is not linguistically unreasonable. This formulation was standard across late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American legal dictionaries and treatises on statutory interpretation. The substance is reliable; the headword is not.