Definition
"TIONAL" does not appear to be a recognized legal term. The source material provided contains what is clearly a fragment of a larger entry — most likely the tail end of the word "CONSTITUTIONAL" or "UNCONSTITUTIONAL" — with the leading characters truncated. The substantive content in the Bouvier's excerpt addresses the presumption of constitutionality of state statutes and the severability doctrine, neither of which belongs to a term called "TIONAL."
This entry cannot be completed as submitted because no such legal term exists.
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Common Confusion
Do not treat this fragment as a standalone term. The confusion here is mechanical, not conceptual: OCR and scanning errors in historical legal dictionary digitization routinely produce truncated headwords. Researchers should not interpret the appearance of "TIONAL" in an index or search result as evidence of a distinct legal concept.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers encountering "TIONAL" in a Law Mind corpus search are most likely dealing with a digitization or OCR artifact — a common problem in historical legal dictionaries that have been scanned or converted to machine-readable text. The leading portion of the headword was lost, leaving only the suffix. The Bouvier's passage reproduced here discusses two doctrines of genuine research significance:
1. The presumption of constitutionality: Courts presume state legislation valid where the subject matter falls within acknowledged legislative powers, and the burden falls on challengers to clearly demonstrate otherwise.
2. Severability: Where part of a statute is unconstitutional, the remainder survives if it can stand independently.
Both doctrines should be researched under their correct headwords. If you arrived here via a corpus search, check for entries under CONSTITUTIONAL, UNCONSTITUTIONAL, CONSTITUTIONALITY, PRESUMPTION OF VALIDITY, and SEVERABILITY.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The Bouvier's fragment cites 6 Cranch 87 (likely McCulloch-era Supreme Court material), 1 Cowen 564 (New York), and 7 N.Y. 109 — citations consistent with mid-nineteenth-century constitutional doctrine as Bouvier's would have treated it. The passage reflects the settled Marshallian presumption that legislative acts within acknowledged powers carry a strong validity presumption. The severability point — that a partially unconstitutional statute does not fall entirely — was well established in Bouvier's era and remains current doctrine, though modern severability analysis has grown considerably more nuanced.
The historical dictionaries do not contain an entry for "TIONAL" because none exists. The fragment is an editorial or digitization error, not a genuine headword.
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