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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Exactly right and exactly on point in this case.
  Justice Scalia explained the extraordinary importance of
hewing to the ordinary meaning of a phrase: “Adhering to
the fair meaning of the text (the textualist’s touchstone)
does not limit one to the hyperliteral meaning of each word
in the text. In the words of Learned Hand: ‘a sterile liter-
alism . . . loses sight of the forest for the trees.’ The full
body of a text contains implications that can alter the literal
meaning of individual words.” A. Scalia & B. Garner, Read-
ing Law 356 (2012) (footnote omitted). Put another way,
“the meaning of a sentence may be more than that of the
separate words, as a melody is more than the notes.”
Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F. 2d 809, 810–811 (CA2 1934) (L.
Hand, J.). Judges must take care to follow ordinary mean-
ing “when two words combine to produce a meaning that is
not the mechanical composition of the two words sepa-
rately.” Eskridge, Interpreting Law, at 62. Dictionaries are
not “always useful for determining the ordinary meaning of
word clusters (like ‘driving a vehicle’) or phrases and
clauses or entire sentences.” Id., at 44. And we must rec-
ognize that a phrase can cover a “dramatically smaller cat-
egory than either component term.” Id., at 62.
  If the usual evidence indicates that a statutory phrase
bears an ordinary meaning different from the literal
strung-together definitions of the individual words in the
phrase, we may not ignore or gloss over that discrepancy.
“Legislation cannot sensibly be interpreted by stringing to-
gether dictionary synonyms of each word and proclaiming
that, if the right example of the meaning of each is selected,
the ‘plain meaning’ of the statute leads to a particular re-
sult. No theory of interpretation, including textualism it-
self, is premised on such an approach.” 883 F. 3d 100, 144,
n. 7 (CA2 2018) (Lynch, J., dissenting).4
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   4 Another longstanding canon of statutory interpretation—the absurd-

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