Many legal arguments are wholly concerned with establishing definitions, especially in those cases which deal with statute law.  The recent decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States in the Corporation Tax cases and the Standard Oil Case are examples:  in each of these what was at issue was the exact meaning of the words used in certain statutes passed by Congress.  In the common law, too, there are many phrases which have come down from past centuries, the meanings of which have been defined again and again as new cases came up.  We have seen (p. 63) how careful definition the word “murder” may need.  “Malice aforethought” is another familiar instance:  it sounds simple, but when one begins to fix the limits at which sudden anger passes over into cool and deliberate enmity, or how far gone a man must be in drink before he loses the consciousness of his purposes, even a layman can see that it has difficulties.

In such cases as these a dictionary definition would be merely a starting point.  It may be a very useful starting point, however, as in the following extract from an article by Mr. E.P.  Ripley, president of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway Company, on “The Railroads and the People”: 

There is one point regarding this matter that many forget:  this is that in all affairs there are two kinds of discrimination.  There is the kind, which, as the dictionary expresses it, “sets apart as being different,” which “distinguishes accurately,” and there is the widely different kind which “treats unequally.” in all ordinary affairs of life we condemn as “undiscriminating” those who have so little judgment or fairness as not to “distinguish accurately” or “set apart things that are different”—­who either treat equally things that are unequal, or treat unequally things that are equal.  Now, when the railway traffic manager “sets apart things that are different,” and treats them differently, he simply does what it is the duty of every one to do.[56]

Then he goes on to develop this definition by showing the facts on which it has to bear.

On the other hand do not bore your readers with dictionary definitions of words whose meaning no one doubts; that is a waste of good paper for you, and of good time for them; and we have seen in Chapter II the futility of the dictionary for cases in which there is real disagreement over the meaning of a word.

It will be seen, then, that the analysis you have made in preparation for the brief may spread out large or small in the argument itself.  It is wise, therefore, to look on the work done for the introduction to the brief as work done largely to clear up your own thought on the subject; when you come to writing out the argument itself, you can go back to the introduction to the brief, and see how much space you are now going to give it.