Alito, J., dissenting
discussed.
II
A
So far, I have not looked beyond dictionary definitions of “sex,” but textualists like Justice Scalia do not confine their inquiry to the scrutiny of dictionaries. See Manning, Textualism and the Equity of the Statute, 101 Colum. L. Rev. 1, 109 (2001). Dictionary definitions are valuable because they are evidence of what people at the time of a statute’s enactment would have understood its words to mean. Ibid. But they are not the only source of relevant evidence, and what matters in the end is the answer to the question that the evidence is gathered to resolve: How would the terms of a statute have been understood by ordinary people at the time of enactment?
Justice Scalia was perfectly clear on this point. The words of a law, he insisted, “mean what they conveyed to reasonable people at the time.” Reading Law, at 16 (emphasis added).[1]
Leading proponents of Justice Scalia’s school of textualism have expounded on this principle and explained that it is grounded on an understanding of the way language works. As Dean John F. Manning explains, “the meaning of language depends on the way a linguistic community uses words and phrases in context.” What Divides Textualists From Purposivists? 106 Colum. L. Rev. 70, 78 (2006). “[O]ne can make sense of others’ communications only by placing them in their appropriate social and linguistic context,” id., at 79–80, and this is no less true of statutes than any other verbal communications. “[S]tatutes convey meaning only because members of a relevant linguistic
- ↑ See also Chisom v. Roemer, 501 U. S. 380, 405 (1991) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (“We are to read the words of [a statutory] text as any ordinary Member of Congress would have read them ... and apply the meaning so determined”).
