Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 781.0

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Unit: $U56

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706

JOHNSON v. UNITED STATES

Opinion of the Court

that is “revoked” continues to have some effect. And since
it continues in some sense after revocation even when part
of it is served in prison, why can the balance of it not remain
effective as a term of supervised release when the reincar-
ceration is over? 8

Without more, we would have to admit that Congress had
used “revoke” in an unconventional way in subsection (3),
but it turns out that the unconventional sense is not unheard
of. See United States v. O’Neil, 11 F. 3d 292, 295–296 (CA1
1993). Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (our
edition of which was issued three years before the 1984 Act)
reveals that “revoke” can mean “to call or summon back,”
without the implication (here) that no further supervised re-
lease is subsequently possible.
It gives “recall” as a syn-
onym and comments that “RECALL in this sense indicates
a calling back, suspending, or abrogating, either ﬁnally as
erroneous or ill-advised or tentatively for deliberation . . . .”
Ibid.9 The unconventional dictionary deﬁnition is not, of

8 Justice Scalia, post, at 721, thinks the “term” survives only as a
measure of duration, but of course the statute does not read “require the
person to serve a term in prison equal to all or part of the term of super-
vised release . . . .”

9 While this sense is of course less common, the most recent editions of
the most authoritative dictionaries do not tag it as rare or obsolete. The
Oxford English Dictionary gives ﬁve examples of this usage, albeit hardly
recent ones: three are drawn from the late 16th century and the most
recent from 1784.
13 Oxford English Dictionary 838 (2d ed. 1989). But
the OED is unabashedly antiquarian; of its examples for the more common
meaning of “revoke,” the most recent dates from 1873.
Ibid. Webster’s,
it should be noted, includes the less common meaning, without antiquarian
reproach, in its third edition. Webster’s Third New International Dic-
tionary 1944 (1981).

As Justice Scalia remarks, in relying on an uncommon sense of the
word, we are departing from the rule of construction that prefers ordinary
meaning, see post, at 715. But this is exactly what ought to happen when
the ordinary meaning fails to ﬁt the text and when the realization of clear
congressional policy (here, favoring the ability to impose supervised re-
lease) is in tension with the result that customary interpretive rules would
deliver. See, e. g., Commissioner v. Brown, 380 U. S. 563, 571 (1965) (rec-
ognizing “some ‘scope for adopting a restricted rather than a literal or