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

At the center of the sprawling legal battle over President Trump’s domestic military deployments is a single word: rebellion.

To justify sending the National Guard to Los Angeles and other cities over the outcry of local leaders, the Trump administration has cited an obscure and little-used law empowering presidents to federalize soldiers to “suppress” a rebellion, or the threat of one.

But the statute does not define the word on which it turns. That’s where Bryan A. Garner comes in.

For decades, Garner has defined the words that make up the law. The landmark legal reference book he edits, 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 magnum opus, as essential to attorneys as Gray’s Anatomy is to physicians.

Now, Black’s definition of rebellion is at the center of two critical pending decisions in cases from Portland, Ore., and Chicago — one currently being reheard by the 9th Circuit and the other on the emergency docket at the Supreme Court — that could unleash a flood of armed soldiers into American streets.

That a dictionary could influence a court case at all owes in part to Garner’s seminal book on textualism, a conserative legal doctrine that dictates a page-bound interpretation of the law. His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.

On a recent weekday, the country’s leading legal lexicographer was ensconced among the 4,500 some-odd dictionaries that fill his Dallas home, revising 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” was never far from his mind.

Federal authorities stand guard at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Ore., that has been the site of protests against the Trump administration.

(Sean Bascom / Anadolu via Getty Images)

“One of the very first cases citing my book sent a man to his capital punishment,” he explained of an earlier dictionary. “They cited me, the guy was put to death. I was very disturbed by that at first.”

He managed his distress by doubling down on his craft. In its first 100 years, Black’s Law Dictionary was revised and reissued six times. From 1999 to 2024, Garner produced six new editions.

“I work on it virtually every day,” he said.

Most mornings, he rises before dawn, settling behind a desk in one of his three home libraries around 4 a.m. to begin the day’s defining.

That fastidiousness has not stopped the lexical war over his work in recent months, as judges across the country read opposite meanings into “rebellion.”

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

In making their case, virtually all have invoked Black’s definition — one Garner has personally penned for the last 30 years. He began editing the 124-year-old reference book in 1995.

“The word ‘rebellion’ has been stable in its three basic meanings in Black’s since I took over,” he said.

“Ooo! So at some point I added, ‘usually through violence,’” he amended himself.

This change comes from the definition’s first sense: 1. Open, organized, and armed resistance to an established government or ruler; esp., an organized attempt to change the government or leader of a country, usu. through violence.

States have touted this meaning to argue the word rebellion cannot possibly apply to torched Waymos in Los Angeles or naked bicyclists in Portland.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has leaned on the second and third senses to say the opposite.

The California Department of Justice wrote in its amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the Illinois case that federal authorities argue rebellion means any form of “resistance or opposition to authority or tradition,” including disobeying “a legal command or summons.”

“But it is not remotely plausible to think that Congress intended to adopt that expansive definition,” the state said.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth walks onto a stage

Although the scope and the stakes of the rebellion fight make it unique, the debate over definitions is nothing new, experts say.

The use of legal dictionaries to solve judicial problems has surged in recent years, with the rise of Scalia-style textualism and the growing sense in certain segments of the public that judges simply make the law up as they go along.

By 2018, the Supreme Court was citing dictionary definitions in half of its opinions, up dramatically from prior years, according to Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Stanford Law School.

Splitting hairs over what makes a rebellion is a new level of absurdity, he said. “This is an unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court’s obsession with dictionaries.”

“Reducing the meaning of a statute to one (of the many) dictionary definitions is unlikely to give you a useful answer,” he said. “What it gives you is a means of manipulating the definition to achieve the result you want.”

Garner has publicly acknowledged the limits of his work. Ultimately, it’s up to judges to decide cases based on precedents, evidence, and the relevant law. Dictionaries are an adjunct.

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

“The words are law,” Garner said.

Law enforcement officers watch from a ledge as a protester stands outside in an inflatable frog costume

Judges who cite dictionaries are “not ceding power to lexicographers,” he argued, but simply giving appropriate heft to the text enacted by Congress.

Others call the dictionary a fig leaf for the interpretive excesses of jurists bent on reading the law to suit a political agenda.

“Judges don’t want to take personal responsibility for saying ‘Yes, there’s a rebellion’ 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.”

Though he agreed with Black’s definition of rebellion, Segall rejected the idea it could shape jurisprudence: “That’s not how our legal system works,” he said.

The great challenge in the troops cases, legal scholars agree, is that they turn on a vague, century-old text with no relevant case law to help define it.

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

Before Trump deployed troops to L.A. in June, the law had been used only once in its 103-year history.

With little interpretation to oppose it, the Justice Department has wielded its novel reading of the statute to justify the use of federalized troops to support immigration arrests and put down demonstrations.

Administration attorneys say the president’s decision to send soldiers to Los Angeles, Portland and Chicago is “unreviewable” by courts, and that troops can remain in federal service in perpetuity once called up, regardless of how conditions change.

A Border Patrol official marches with federal agents

Judges have so far rejected these claims. But they have split on the thornier issues of whether community efforts to disrupt immigration enforcement leave Trump “unable with the regular forces to execute the laws” — another trigger for the statute — and if sporadic violence at protests adds up to rebellion.

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

On Oct 23, Oregon claimed the Department of Justice inflated the number of federal protective personnel it said were detailed to Portland in response to protests to more than triple its actual size — a mistake the department called an “unintended ambiguity.”

The inflated number was repeatedly cited in oral arguments before the 9th Circuit and more than a dozen times in the court’s Oct. 20 decision allowing the federalization of Oregon’s troops — an order the court reversed Tuesday while it is reviewed.

The 7th Circuit noted similar falsehoods, leading that court to block the Chicago deployment.

“The [U.S. District] court found that all three of the federal government’s declarations from those with firsthand knowledge were unreliable to the extent they omitted material information or were undermined by independent, objective evidence,” the panel wrote in its Oct 11 decision.

A Supreme Court decision expected in that case will probably define Trump’s power to deploy troops throughout the Midwest — and potentially across the country.

For Garner, that 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 spare time, he travels the country teaching legal writing.

The editor credits his prodigious output to strict discipline. As an undergrad at the University of Texas, he swore off weekly Longhorns games and eschewed his beloved Dallas Cowboys to concentrate on writing, a practice he has maintained with Calvinist devotion ever since.

“I haven’t seen a game for the last 46 years,” the lexicographer said, though he makes a biannual exception for the second halves of the Super Bowl and college football’s national championship game.

As for the political football with Black’s “rebellion,” 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 it writes anything about the meaning of the word rebellion, that might well affect the next edition of Black’s Law Dictionary.”

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