At the center of the unfolding legal battle over President Trump's domestic military deployment is one word: insurrection.
To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities despite protests from local leaders, the Trump administration cited an obscure and little-used law that gives presidents the authority to federalize troops to “quell” an insurrection or threat of one.
But the law does not define the word on which it is based. And that's where Brian A. Garner comes to the rescue.
For decades, Garner defined the words that make up the law. The famous legal reference book he edits, Black's Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels, and the brass scales of justice.
The Dictionary is Garner's magnum opus, as important to lawyers as Gray's Anatomy is to doctors.
Now Black's definition of a riot is at the center of two landmark decisions pending in cases in Portland, Ore., and Chicago—one currently under review in the 9th Circuit and another pending an emergency case before the Supreme Court—that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers onto American streets.
That the dictionary could have an impact on the court case at all is due in part to Garner's seminal book on textualism, the conservative legal doctrine that dictates interpretation of the law on the page. Its co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist reading of the Constitution paved the way for the court's recent overturning of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.
On a recent weekday, the nation's leading legal lexicographer took refuge among the 4,500-plus dictionaries that fill his Dallas home and corrected the entry for the adjective “calculated” ahead of Black's 13th edition.
But despite his best efforts not to dwell on the stakes of his work, the noun “rebellion” never left his mind.
Federal authorities are guarding the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building in Portland, Oregon, which has become the site of protests against the Trump administration.
(Sean Bascom/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“One of the very first times that quoting my book got a person put to death,” he explained of the earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was executed. It really bothered me at first.”
He dealt with his adversity by doubling his skill. During the first 100 years of its existence, Black's Law Dictionary was revised and reprinted six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner released six new titles.
“I work on it almost every day,” he said.
Most days, he rises before dawn and sits down at his desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin defining the day.
That pickiness hasn't stopped a lexical war surrounding his work in recent months, with judges across the country interpreting opposing meanings of the word “riot.”
The Justice Department and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois also sparred over the issue.
In making their arguments, almost everyone referred to the Black definition, which Garner personally penned over the past 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.
“The word ‘riot’ has been consistent among Blacks in three main senses since I came to power,” he said.
“Ooo! So at some point I added: “usually through violence,” he corrected himself.
This change comes from the first sense of the definition: 1. Open, organized and armed resistance to an existing government or ruler; especially, an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usually. through violence.
States touted the meaning, arguing that the word “insurrection” couldn't apply to the torched Waymos in Los Angeles or the naked cyclists in Portland.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration, relying on second and third senses, argues the opposite.
The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue that insurrection means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or custom,” including disobedience to “a lawful order or summons.”
“It is unlikely, however, that Congress intended such an expansive definition,” the state said.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth takes the stage to deliver a speech as part of the Marine Corps' 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.
(Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images)
While the scale and stakes of the insurgency make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.
The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has increased dramatically in recent years with the advent of Scalia-style textualism and a growing feeling among certain segments of the public that judges are simply making up the law as they go along.
By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its decisions, a significant increase from previous years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.
According to him, speculation about the causes of the uprising is a new level of absurdity. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court's obsession with dictionaries.”
“Reducing the meaning of a law to one (of many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “This gives you the ability to manipulate the definition to achieve the desired result.”
Garner publicly acknowledged the limitations of his work. Ultimately, judges must decide cases based on precedent, evidence and relevant law. Dictionaries are an addition.
Nevertheless, he and other textualists see the turn to dictionaries as an important corrective to the interpretive excesses of the past.
“Words are law,” Garner said.
Law enforcement officers watch from the ledge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement building as a protester stands outside wearing an inflatable frog costume on October 21 in Portland, Oregon.
(Jenny Kane/Associated Press)
Judges who cite dictionaries “do not cede power to the lexicographers,” he argued, but simply give due weight to the text adopted by Congress.
Others have called the dictionary a fig leaf because of the excesses of interpretation by lawyers seeking to read the law according to a political agenda.
“Judges don't want to take personal responsibility for saying, 'Yes, there is a riot,' or 'No, there isn't,' so they say, 'The dictionary made me do it,'” said Eric J. Segall, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law. “No, it's not like that.”
While Segall agreed with Black's definition of a riot, he rejected the idea that it would influence judicial practice: “That's not how our legal system works,” he said.
The big problem with military cases, legal scholars say, is that they rely on vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.
Unlike previous presidents who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump used a little-known section of the US code to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and send military forces into American cities.
Before Trump sent troops to Los Angeles in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.
Unable to counter this, the Justice Department used its new reading of the law to justify the use of federal troops to support immigrant arrests and suppress demonstrations.
Administration lawyers say the president's decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “not subject to review” by the courts and that service members can remain in federal service forever after enlistment, no matter how conditions change.
Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino marches with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on August 14.
(Carleen Steele/Los Angeles Times)
Judges have so far rejected those claims. But they are divided on more pressing questions: whether community efforts to undermine Trump's immigration controls leave them “unable by regular force to execute the laws” (another trigger for the law) and whether sporadic violence at protests is escalating into insurrection.
As of this week, the appellate courts also remain sharply divided over the evidence.
On Oct. 23, Oregon said the Justice Department had inflated the number of federal security officers it said had been deployed to Portland in response to the protests by more than three times the actual number, an error the department called “unintentional ambiguity.”
The inflated figure was mentioned repeatedly in oral arguments in the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court's Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon troops – a ruling the court overturned Tuesday while it was pending.
The Seventh Circuit noted similar lies, leading the court to block the deployment of troops to Chicago.
” [U.S. District] The Court found that all three federal government statements made by those with first-hand knowledge were unreliable to the extent that they omitted material information or were rebutted by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct. 11 decision.
The Supreme Court's expected decision in the case will likely determine Trump's authority to deploy troops across the Midwest — and perhaps across the country.
For Garner, the decision means more work.
In addition to his dictionaries, he is also the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his free time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.
The editor attributes his outstanding results to strict discipline. As a student at the University of Texas, he gave up weekly Longhorns games and avoided his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinistic devotion ever since.
“I haven’t seen a game in 46 years,” the lexicographer said, although he makes an exception every other year for the second half of the Super Bowl and the College Football National Championship game.
As for the political football with Black's “riot,” he's waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.
“I will be watching very closely what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If it says anything about the meaning of the word riot, it may well influence the next edition of Black's Law Dictionary.”
