Definition
"Odds of" does not appear as a recognized legal term of art in standard legal usage. The fragment preserved in the Bouvier's source material — beginning "Words not defined by statute... and the exact meaning is in dispute" — is not a definition of "odds of" as a legal concept. The text is almost certainly a truncated entry from a discussion of undefined statutory terms, most likely relating to the phrase "unfair methods of competition" or a similar open-ended standard found in trade regulation law. The phrase "ods of" as it appears in the source is likely a corrupted or incomplete rendering of a longer term — possibly "methods of," "standards of," or "odds of [competition]" — caused by a scanning, transcription, or indexing error in the source corpus.
No recognized legal dictionary, statute, or body of case law defines "ods of" as a standalone legal term. This entry records the source fragment for corpus transparency and researcher reference, but cannot produce a substantive definition where no coherent term exists.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "ods of" as a dictionary headword in the Law Mind corpus should treat it as a corrupted or truncated entry, not a genuine term of art. The underlying Bouvier's text — referring to words not defined by statute, courts as ultimate arbiters of meaning, and practices "characterized by deception, bad faith, fraud or oppression, or as against public policy" — is substantively consistent with Bouvier's discussions of unfair trade practices and the interpretive standards courts applied to open-textured statutory language in the early twentieth century. The reference to the Sherman Act in the fragment further supports this context.
If your research concerns the interpretive methodology described in the source fragment — specifically, how courts determine the meaning of undefined statutory terms in trade regulation — the relevant corpus entries are those addressing unfair methods of competition, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and judicial construction of undefined statutory standards. Do not rely on this headword as a primary source for any of those concepts.
The corrupted headword also illustrates a known hazard in historical legal dictionary research: OCR errors, page-break artifacts, and incomplete digitization can generate false headwords from mid-sentence fragments. Cross-check any unusual or seemingly incomplete headword against surrounding entries and the underlying print source before building a research argument on it.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The only source material available is the Bouvier's Law Dictionary fragment reproduced above. That fragment discusses the judicial role in construing undefined statutory terms and identifies the class of practices at issue as those "never heretofore regarded as opposed to good morals because characterized by deception, bad faith, fraud or oppression, or as against public policy because of their danger" — language closely tracking early FTC-era commentary on unfair trade practices. Bouvier's treatment of such terms generally emphasized that courts, not administrative agencies, held final interpretive authority over undefined statutory language, a point that was actively contested in the regulatory jurisprudence of the early twentieth century. The fragment adds nothing to the corpus as a definition of "ods of" because no such term exists; its value, if any, lies in the underlying doctrinal discussion, which is better accessed through intact entries on the relevant substantive concepts.
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