[dragonwriter]

> Not a lawyer and haven't read that many rulings, but this one looked pretty normal and not that "sarcasm-oozing" to me.

Yeah, so, it's hard to detect variation from the norm if you have no basis for understanding where the baseline and range of normal variation is.

While not a lawyer, I've studied law and read lots of court rulings, and the excerpt provided is pretty high on the list of the most condescending rejections of a lower court decision I've seen.

> Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary.

Citing, for the same common term, both a 1911 general-use dictionary and the 1891 first edition of Black's Law (other than for a time-specific meaning of a term in a turn-of-the-century law), on top on the “this is a noun, this is an adjective that modifies the noun” bit, is pretty much saying “English...it's a thing you might want to look into.”