Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/20pdf/19-783_k53l.pdf
Page Number: 15

Cite as:  593 U. S. ____ (2021) 

11 

Opinion of the Court 

4 
The  Government  falls  back  on  what  it  describes  as  the 
“common parlance” meaning of the phrase “exceeds author-
ized access.”  Brief for United States 20–21.  According to 
the Government, any ordinary speaker of the English lan-
guage would think that Van Buren “exceed[ed] his author-
ized access” to the law enforcement database when he ob-
tained license-plate information for personal purposes.  Id., 
at 21.  The dissent, for its part, asserts that this point “set-
tles” the case.  Post, at 9. 

If the phrase “exceeds authorized access” were all we had
to  go  on,  the  Government  and  the  dissent  might  have  a 
point.  But both breeze by the CFAA’s explicit definition of 
the  phrase  “exceeds  authorized  access.”    When  “a  statute 
includes an explicit definition” of a term, “we must follow 
that  definition,  even  if  it  varies  from  a  term’s  ordinary
meaning.”  Tanzin v. Tanvir, 592 U. S. ___, ___ (2020) (slip 
op., at 3) (internal quotation marks omitted).  So the rele-
vant question is not whether Van Buren exceeded his au-
thorized access but whether he exceeded his authorized ac-
cess  as  the  CFAA  defines  that  phrase.  And  as  we  have 
already explained, the statutory definition favors Van Bu-
ren’s reading.

That reading, moreover, is perfectly consistent with the
way  that  an  “appropriately  informed”  speaker  of  the  lan-
guage  would  understand  the  meaning  of  “exceeds  author-
ized access.”  Nelson, What Is Textualism?  91 Va. L. Rev. 
347,  354  (2005).  When  interpreting  statutes,  courts  take 
note of terms that carry “technical meaning[s].”  A. Scalia 
&  B.  Garner,  Reading  Law:  The  Interpretation  of  Legal 
Texts 73 (2012).  “Access” is one such term, long carrying a 
“well established” meaning in the “computational sense”—
a meaning that matters when interpreting a statute about 
computers.  American Heritage Dictionary 10 (3d ed. 1992).
In the computing context, “access” references the act of en-
tering a computer “system itself ” or a particular “part of a