One of my favorite parts of the NY Times Magazine was William Safire’s “On Language” column. At least for now, the column survives his passing. This week’s column, by Ammon Shea, is on “old dictionaries,” and it mentions Justice Scalia’s attraction to them in his statutory interpretation cases.
The article references this HLR student note by Kevin Werbach. I have not read that piece, but I highly recommend my colleague Ellen Aprill‘s excellent article on the subject, The Law of the Word: Dictionary Shopping in the Supreme Court.