Whereas in certain domains, the law relies on terms of art (e.g., "injunction, " "double jeopardy, " "punitive damages, " and "bankruptcy"), in others-in particular in criminal law-it invokes, or takes itself to invoke, the plain everyday meaning of the expressions used. is is unsurprising: citizens, standardly not equipped with a law degree, must understand what the law says in order to adhere to it. Furthermore, in common law jurisdictions, nonexperts help decide court cases in jury trials. And when it comes to disputes in statutory interpretation among judges, turning to ordinary meaning is one, if not-as some scholars and practitioners argue 1 -the evident strategy to resolve them. 2 According to what we term the correspondence assumption, certain central legal expressions are taken to refer to the same concepts as their corresponding ordinary language analogues (at least within designated spheres of the law). Candidate concepts for the correspondence assumption are plentiful. Consent is one. At a recent sexual misconduct trial in the United States, the judge refused to provide conceptual classification and stated that "the jury will decide what consent means to them" (Puente, Sloan, & Deerwester, 2018; for empirical work on the notion of consent, see Sommers, 2020). e expression "reasonable" and the concept it denotes constitute another example. As Gardner (2015) writes, the reasonable person standard "exists to allow the law to pass the buck, to help itself pro tempore to standards of justification that are not themselves set by the law" (p. 36). Naturally, for a maneuver of this sort to even begin to make sense, it must be assumed that the lay person's concept of reasonableness fits the law's demands. 3 In many jurisdictions, the central mens rea concepts, such as intention, are subject to the correspondence assumption-which is perhaps one of the key reasons why, very frequently, they are le partially or entirely uncodified. 4 e English courts have made this explicit stating that "the legal meaning of the word 'intention' is the ordinary meaning of the word" (Herring, 2012, p. 135). In R v. Moloney [1985], Lord Bridge put it as follows: