""Obiter Dicta," said John A. Finch at the recent banquet of the Indiana State Bar Association, "is not statutory Latin, and we have no information as to how the words would have been translated by the Commissioners who prepared our first Code, had they been required to make such an attempt. The law dictionaries and the Courts translate these words as a phrase, and give us rather an exegesis than a translation. 'Dicta,' says a Judge of the New York Court of Appeals,' are opinions of a Judge which do not embody the resolution or determination of the Court, and made without argument or full consideration of the point; they are not the professed, deliberate determinations of the Judge himself. ' Obiter dicta,' he says, 'are such opinions, uttered by the way, not upon the point or question pending, as if drawn aside for the time from the main topic of the case to collateral subjects.'"
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