Imagine you're crafting an argument in an appellate court. The key statute has language that favors you, but a decades-old Supreme Court case goes the opposite way. Or, from the other side, the case ...

Matthew Chivvis writes that the Federal Circuit's decisions provide conflicting guidance on the duty to construe a term when the plain and ordinary meaning is disputed. The lack of a clear rule has ...

It is a long-cherished precept of the law that the meaning of a word is to be accorded its plain meaning. To borrow a Dr. Seussism, when interpreting a statute or the Constitution, a court must be ...

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit reversed and vacated a decision by the Patent Trial & Appeal Board, explaining that the Board failed to consider common textual modifier language when ...

The Justices revive the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment in barring discrimination by race at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, ...