1. To express or involve indirectly; to suggest (the opinion implies that the court has adopted a stricter standard for upholding punitive-damages awards). Cf. INFER.
2. (Of a court) to impute or impose on equitable or legal grounds (the court implied a contract between the parties).
3. To read into (a document) (citing grounds of fairness, the court implied a condition that the parties had not expressed). See implied term under TERM(2). — implication, n.
“Anglo-American judges, who continually evaluate facts, often use the phrase by implication (= by what is implied, though not formally expressed, by natural inference), along with its various cognates. Judges (by implication) draw ‘natural inferences’ and thereby decide that something or other was, in the circumstances, ‘implied.’ Through the process of hypallage — a semantic shift by which the attributes of the true subject are transferred to another subject — the word imply has come to be used in reference to what the judges do, as opposed to the circumstances. This specialized use of imply runs counter to popular lay use and is not adequately treated in English-language dictionaries.
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“The lawyer’s imply has directly encroached on the word infer. Whereas nonlawyers frequently use infer for imply, lawyers and judges conflate the two in the opposite direction, by using imply for infer. In analyzing the facts of a case, judges will imply one fact from certain others. (From is a telling preposition.) Nonlawyers believe they must be inferring an additional fact from those already known; if contractual terms are implied, they must surely be implied by the words or circumstances of the contract and not by the judges.” Bryan A. Garner, A Dictionary of Modern Legal Usage 423, 424 (2d ed. 1995).
