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DRAFT FOR ATTORNEY REVIEW — NOT FINAL

Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)

Citation
Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Parent Document
Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Effective Date
2020-06-15

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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?