Not Just for Big Words

http://www.thebeerbarrel.net/showthread.php?8133-Justices-Turning-More-Frequently-to-Dictionary

J. Gordon Christy, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, surveyed the scene in 2006, and he did not like what he saw. “We are treated,” Mr. Christy wrote in The Mississippi Law Journal, “to the truly absurd spectacle of august justices and judges arguing over which unreliable dictionary and which unreliable dictionary definition should be deemed authoritative.”
In the last two decades, the use of dictionaries at the Supreme Court has been booming.
A new study in The Marquette Law Review found that the justices had used dictionaries to define 295 words or phrases in 225 opinions in the 10 years starting in October 2000. That is roughly in line with the previous decade but an explosion by historical standards. In the 1960s, for instance, the court relied on dictionaries to define 23 terms in 16 opinions.
Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Benjamin N. Cardozo and Louis D. Brandeis managed to make it through distinguished careers on the Supreme Court without citing dictionaries.
Learned Hand, widely considered the greatest judge never to have served on the Supreme Court, cautioned against the mechanical examination of words in isolation.