Section 7

Citation: Section 7
Parent Document: Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020)
Jurisdiction: United States (federal)
Effective Date: 2020-06-15
Original Source: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/4760997/bostock-v-clayton-county/ ↗

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today or in one context might have meant something else at
the time of its adoption or might mean something different
in another context. And we must be attuned to the possi-
bility that a statutory phrase ordinarily bears a different
meaning than the terms do when viewed individually or lit-
erally. To ferret out such shifts in linguistic usage or subtle
distinctions between literal and ordinary meaning, this
Court has sometimes consulted the understandings of the
law’s drafters as some (not always conclusive) evidence.
For example, in the context of the National Motor Vehicle
Theft Act, this Court admitted that the term “vehicle” in
1931 could literally mean “a conveyance working on land,
water or air.” McBoyle v. United States, 283 U. S. 25, 26
(1931). But given contextual clues and “everyday speech”
at the time of the Act’s adoption in 1919, this Court con-
cluded that “vehicles” in that statute included only things
“moving on land,” not airplanes too. Ibid. Similarly, in New
Prime, we held that, while the term “contracts of employ-
ment” today might seem to encompass only contracts with
employees, at the time of the statute’s adoption the phrase
was ordinarily understood to cover contracts with inde-
pendent contractors as well. 586 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op.,
at 6–9). Cf. post, at 7–8 (KAVANAUGH, J., dissenting)
(providing additional examples).
  The employers, however, advocate nothing like that here.
They do not seek to use historical sources to illustrate that
the meaning of any of Title VII’s language has changed
since 1964 or that the statute’s terms, whether viewed in-
dividually or as a whole, ordinarily carried some message
we have missed. To the contrary, as we have seen, the em-
ployers agree with our understanding of all the statutory
language—“discriminate against any individual . . . be-
cause of such individual’s . . . sex.” Nor do the competing
dissents offer an alternative account about what these
terms mean either when viewed individually or in the ag-
26             BOSTOCK v. CLAYTON COUNTY Opinion of the Court

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