Definition
RESORT carries two distinct legal meanings that operate in entirely separate doctrinal contexts.
1. Court of last resort. The highest tribunal to which a case may be carried for final review — the court whose decision is conclusive and not subject to further appellate correction within a given judicial system. In the federal structure, the Supreme Court of the United States is the court of last resort for questions of federal law. Each state has its own court of last resort for questions of state law, though the name varies (Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Supreme Judicial Court, etc.).
2. Recourse or resort as a principle of legal sequencing. The act of turning to a particular remedy, authority, rule, or source only after prior options have been exhausted or proven unavailable. This sense appears in doctrines requiring that a party exhaust administrative remedies before resorting to judicial relief, or that a secondary rule of construction be applied only as a last resort when primary rules fail to resolve ambiguity.
A third, largely historical use: property returning or reverting along a particular line of descent. This usage, preserved in Burrill and drawn from Hale's History of the Common Law, has no practical modern application but appears in older real property sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A place where people go for recreation, especially one with facilities such as lodgings, entertainment, and a relaxing environment; also, recourse or refuge turned to for safety.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Active power or movement; spring. (Noted as a Gallicism, obsolete.)
The recreational sense — a resort as a destination hotel or vacation complex — is the dominant modern meaning and shares essentially nothing with the legal uses. The recourse sense in Wiktionary ("something turned to for safety") is closer to legal usage but still lacks the doctrinal weight that "last resort" carries in jurisdictional and remedial contexts. Researchers encountering "resort" in a legal document should immediately determine whether it refers to court hierarchy or the sequencing of remedies, and set aside the recreational sense entirely.
Common Confusion
Court of last resort is sometimes conflated with court of final jurisdiction or court of general jurisdiction. These are not the same. A court of general jurisdiction has broad subject-matter authority at the trial level. A court of last resort sits at the apex of the appellate hierarchy. Additionally, in states where the intermediate appellate court is named "Court of Appeals" and the highest court is named "Supreme Court" — or vice versa, as in New York — researchers must verify which body actually functions as the court of last resort before treating a decision as final authority.
Why It Matters in Research
The phrase "court of last resort" is jurisdictionally loaded and changes meaning depending on the system being studied. In federal constitutional litigation, it points to the U.S. Supreme Court. In state law matters, it points to whichever body sits at the apex of that state's own hierarchy — and the name of that court varies enough to cause real confusion in corpus searches. A full-text search for "court of last resort" in historical sources may return references to state supreme courts, territorial courts, or specialized federal tribunals depending on the era and subject matter.
The exhaustion-of-remedies doctrine, which is where "resort" most often appears as a principle of sequencing, generates its own research traps. Administrative law materials before the mid-twentieth century use "resort" in this sense inconsistently — sometimes meaning a mandatory prerequisite, sometimes merely describing the preferred sequence without hard-bar consequences. The modern exhaustion doctrine as a jurisdictional rule hardened over time; earlier sources treating it as discretionary should not be read to reflect current law.
The historical reversion sense in Burrill — property that "resorted" to a particular line — will appear in chancery materials, old real property treatises, and early English common law sources. It is essentially dead terminology in modern American legal writing, but researchers working in colonial-era land records or early equity cases may encounter it and need to recognize it.
For immigration law researchers, "last resort" appears as a term of art in the context of discretionary relief mechanisms, where certain forms of relief are structurally available only after other channels have been tried or are unavailable.
Historical Dictionary Support
Anderson's defines "last resort" exclusively in the judicial hierarchy sense — the court to which a cause may finally be carried — and cross-references COURT, indicating that the deeper treatment appears there. This reflects how the term functioned in nineteenth-century practice: "resort" in legal discourse almost always appeared in the compound "last resort" and was understood without elaboration as signifying finality of adjudication.
Burrill reaches back further, connecting "resort" to the French resorter and citing Hale for the property-reversion usage. This is the oldest legal layer of the word and the most distant from modern practice. Burrill's entry is historically useful but offers no analytical framework applicable to modern doctrine.
Black's (2nd Ed.) does not carry a standalone entry for RESORT in the material provided, though the adjacent entry for RESISTANCE appears in the source material, suggesting the dictionary's treatment of RESORT either appeared nearby or was subsumed under COURT or related headings. The absence of a dedicated entry in Black's reflects the term's role as a component of compound phrases rather than as a freestanding doctrine.
None of the historical dictionaries address the administrative exhaustion sense — the idea that a party must "resort" to administrative remedies before seeking judicial intervention. This doctrinal use developed substantially in the twentieth century and postdates all three source dictionaries. Researchers relying solely on these historical sources will find the exhaustion-of-remedies connection to "resort" entirely absent.
Jurisdictional Note
The identity of the "court of last resort" differs by state and must be verified rather than assumed from the court's name. New York is the most commonly cited example: its Court of Appeals is the court of last resort, not its Supreme Court. Federal subject-matter exceptions also apply — certain specialized federal courts (the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, for example) function as courts of last resort for particular categories of cases without full Supreme Court review being available as a practical matter.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See: Private Bills and Deferred Action — Last-Resort Immigration Relief (The Law Mind Immigration Law Encyclopedia) for treatment of "last resort" as a term of art in discretionary immigration relief.