What makes a rebellion? Trump troop deployment may hinge on definition

At the heart of the growing legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: insurrection.

To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the objections of local leaders, the Trump administration cited an obscure and little-used law that gives presidents the authority to federalize troops to “quell” a riot or threat of insurrection.

However, the statute does not define which word to use. This is where Bryan A. Garner comes into play.

For decades, Garner defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edited, Black’s Law Dictionary, is as much a fixture of American courts as black robes, rosewood gavels, and brass scales of justice.

The dictionary is Garner’s masterpiece and is as indispensable to lawyers as Gray’s Anatomy is to doctors.

Now Black’s definition of riot is at the center of two critical decisions in cases in Portland, Oregon and Chicago, one currently being heard by the 9th Circuit and the other in the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, that could lead to a rush of armed soldiers onto American streets.

The ability of a dictionary to influence a case owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textuality, a conservative legal doctrine that dictates a page-limited interpretation of the law. His co-author was former Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court to reverse recent decisions on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.

On a recent weekday, the nation’s leading legal lexicographer took his place among the 4,500 odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home and reviewed the entry for the adjective “calculated” before Black’s 13th Edition.

But despite his best efforts not to dwell on the risks of his job, the name “rebellion” never left his mind.

He said of an earlier dictionary: “One of the first cases cited in my book involved a man being sentenced to death.” “They made an example of me, the man was executed. I was very disturbed by this at first.”

He managed his adversity by doubling down on his craft. Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and republished six times in its first 100 years. Garner produced six new editions from 1999 to 2024.

“I work on this almost every day,” he said.

Most mornings, he rises before dawn and, around 4 a.m., settles behind a desk in one of three libraries in his home and begins describing the day.

That meticulousness hasn’t stopped the lexical war over his work, with judges across the country reading opposite meanings to the word “sedition” in recent months.

The Justice Department and the attorneys general of California, Oregon and Illinois have likewise argued over the word.

Almost all of them invoked Black’s definition in making their case; It’s a definition that Garner has been personally penning for the past 30 years. In 1995, he started editing the 124-year-old reference book.

“The word ‘riot’ has remained constant in its three primary meanings in Black’s language since I took over,” he said.

“Ah! At one point I added ‘usually through violence’,” he corrected himself.

This change arises from the initial meaning of the definition: 1. Open, organized and armed resistance against an established government or ruler; an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country. through violence.

States have invoked this meaning to argue that the word riot cannot apply to Waymos being burned in Los Angeles or naked cyclists in Portland.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration relied on its second and third senses to tell us otherwise.

In its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case, the California Department of Justice wrote that federal authorities argue that sedition means “resistance or opposition to authority or custom,” including failure to comply with “a lawful command or summons.”

“But it is not at all plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt this broad definition,” State said.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth takes the stage to speak as part of the Marine Corps’ 250th anniversary celebration at Camp Pendleton on Oct. 18.

(Oliver Contreras/AFP via Getty Images)

While the scope and risks of insurgency make it unique, debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.

The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has increased in recent years with the rise of Scalia-style textuality and the growing perception among certain segments of society that judges make up the law themselves.

By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, according to Stanford Law School professor Mark A. Lemley; This rate increased dramatically compared to previous years.

He said it was a new level of hair-splitting nonsense about what constitutes rioting. “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. “What it gives you is a way to manipulate the definition to get the result you want.”

Garner openly acknowledged the limitations of his job. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of judges to decide cases based on precedent, evidence, and relevant law. Dictionaries are a help.

Still, he and other textualists see the return to dictionaries as an important corrective to the interpretive excesses of the past.

“Words are law,” Garner said.

Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility as a protester wearing an inflatable frog costume stands outside on Oct. 21 in Portland, Ore.

(Jenny Kane / Associated Press)

He argued that judges who quote dictionaries “do not cede their power to lexicographers” but merely give appropriate weight to the text adopted by Congress.

Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of lawyers determined to read the law to suit the political agenda.

“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility by 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 didn’t.”

While Segall accepted Black’s definition of rebellion, he rejected the idea that it could shape jurisprudence: “Our legal system doesn’t work that way,” he said.

Lawyers agree that the biggest challenge in military cases is that they resort to an obscure, centuries-old text that lacks relevant case law to help define them.

Unlike past presidents who invoked the Insurrection Act to combat violent crises, Trump used an obscure subsection of U.S. law to wrest command of National Guard troops from state governors and rush military forces into American cities.

Before Trump sent troops to Los Angeles in June, the law had been enforced only once in its 103-year history.

The Justice Department used its new reading of the law to support the detention of immigrants and justify the use of federal troops to suppress demonstrations, with little commentary to counter it.

Administration lawyers say the president’s decision to send troops to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago “cannot be reviewed” by the courts, and that the troops can remain in federal service indefinitely no matter how circumstances change after they are called up.

Border Patrol agent Greg Bovino walks with federal agents to the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on August 14.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they differ on thornier issues, such as whether the community’s efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement would make Trump “fail to enforce the law with regular forces” (another trigger for the statute) and whether sporadic violence at protests could lead to rioting.

As of this week, appellate courts are also sharply divided on the evidence.

On October 23, Oregon claimed that the Department of Justice had increased the number of federal protective personnel it said had been sent to Portland in response to the protests to more than triple its actual size. This error was what the ministry called “unintended ambiguity”.

The inflated number was mentioned repeatedly at oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s October 20 decision allowing federalization of the Oregon corps; That decision was reversed by the court while it was being reviewed on Tuesday.

The 7th Circuit found similar falsehoods, leading the court to block the deployment in Chicago.

“ [U.S. District] The court found that all three of the federal government’s statements, which came from persons with firsthand knowledge, were unreliable to the extent that they did not contain factual information or were rebutted by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct. 11 decision.

An expected Supreme Court decision in this case would likely define Trump’s authority to deploy troops to the Midwest and potentially across the country.

For Garner, this decision means more work.

In addition to his dictionaries, he is the author of numerous other works, including a memoir about his friendship with Scalia. In his spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.

The editor owes his extraordinary output to strict discipline. As an undergraduate 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 continued with his Calvinist commitment ever since.

“I haven’t watched a game in the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, although he makes exceptions every other year for the second half of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.

As for the political football regarding Black’s “mutiny,” he’s waiting to see how the Illinois Guard case plays out.

“I will be looking very closely at what the Supreme Court says,” Garner said. “If he writes something about the meaning of the word sedition, it may well influence the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”