The inverse of Poe’s law, or just a typical article trying to churn up some rageviews?
Yeah, so, it's hard to detect variation from the norm if you have no basis for understanding where the baseline and range of normal variation is.
While not a lawyer, I've studied law and read lots of court rulings, and the excerpt provided is pretty high on the list of the most condescending rejections of a lower court decision I've seen.
> Sometimes they need to use a "common meaning" of a term rather than a legal one, and so they might cite a dictionary.
Citing, for the same common term, both a 1911 general-use dictionary and the 1891 first edition of Black's Law (other than for a time-specific meaning of a term in a turn-of-the-century law), on top on the “this is a noun, this is an adjective that modifies the noun” bit, is pretty much saying “English...it's a thing you might want to look into.”
IANAL, but I was one at one time. For what it's worth, I got a nice chuckle out of that sentence. All things considered, it's pretty condescending to be giving a district court judge a grammar lesson. But he needs one, so good for them!
The main thing isn't the tone, it's the focus. Overturning a lower court usually means talking about how a decision misapplied a test, failed to conform to precedent, enforced an unconstitutional law, or otherwise was coherent-but-wrong.
Here, the issue is that there's nothing subtle in the outcome. The ruling only mentions the relevant court decision and the dictionary citations, implying that that's all Gilstrap needed to get this right. It creates a pretty strong sense of "read the rules, idiot". The discussion of "physical is not virtual" seems especially damning, since it goes into enormous detail just to show that a 'place' is in fact a 'place', and not whatever non-corporeal entity Gilstrap wants it to be.
And, of course, it's a bit of a screw-you to Gilstrap's place in precedent. He outlined a four-part test for these suits, which is the sort of thing that becomes widely used and studied. And the appeals court struck down each branch of that test, meaning that the entire thing is now irrelevant.