Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Page Number: 29.0

Cite as:  590 U. S. ____ (2020) 

25 

Opinion of the Court 

today or in one context might have meant something else at
the time of its adoption or might mean something different
in another context.  And we must be attuned to the possi-
bility  that  a  statutory  phrase  ordinarily  bears  a  different 
meaning than the terms do when viewed individually or lit-
erally.  To ferret out such shifts in linguistic usage or subtle 
distinctions  between  literal  and  ordinary  meaning,  this 
Court has sometimes consulted the understandings of the 
law’s  drafters  as  some  (not  always  conclusive)  evidence.
For example, in the context of the National Motor Vehicle 
Theft  Act,  this  Court  admitted  that  the  term  “vehicle”  in 
1931 could literally mean “a conveyance working on land,
water  or  air.”    McBoyle  v.  United  States,  283  U. S.  25,  26 
(1931).  But given contextual clues and “everyday speech”
at  the  time  of  the  Act’s  adoption  in  1919,  this  Court  con-
cluded that “vehicles” in that statute included only things
“moving on land,” not airplanes too.  Ibid.  Similarly, in New 
Prime, we held that, while the term “contracts of employ-
ment” today might seem to encompass only contracts with
employees, at the time of the statute’s adoption the phrase 
was  ordinarily  understood  to  cover  contracts  with  inde-
pendent contractors as well.  586 U. S., at ___–___ (slip op., 
at  6–9).  Cf.  post,  at  7–8  (KAVANAUGH,  J.,  dissenting) 
(providing additional examples).

The employers, however, advocate nothing like that here. 
They do not seek to use historical sources to illustrate that 
the  meaning  of  any  of  Title  VII’s  language  has  changed
since 1964 or that the statute’s terms, whether viewed in-
dividually or as a whole, ordinarily carried some message 
we have missed.  To the contrary, as we have seen, the em-
ployers  agree  with  our  understanding  of  all  the  statutory 
language—“discriminate  against  any  individual  . . .  be-
cause of such individual’s . . . sex.”  Nor do the competing 
dissents  offer  an  alternative  account  about  what  these 
terms mean either when viewed individually or in the ag-