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Going "Clear", Ryan D. Doerfler
Going "Clear", Ryan D. Doerfler
All Faculty Scholarship
This Article proposes a new framework for evaluating doctrines that assign significance to whether a statutory text is “clear.” As previous scholarship has failed to recognize, such doctrines come in two distinct types. The first, which this Article call evidence-management doctrines, instruct a court to “start with the text,” and to proceed to other sources of statutory meaning only if absolutely necessary. Because they structure a court’s search for what a statute means, the question with each of these doctrines is whether adhering to it aids or impairs that search — the character of the evaluation is, in other words, …
Sausage-Making, Pigs' Ears, And Congressional Expansions Of Federal Jurisdiction: Exxon Mobil V. Allapattah And Its Lessons For The Class Action Fairness Act, Adam N. Steinman
Sausage-Making, Pigs' Ears, And Congressional Expansions Of Federal Jurisdiction: Exxon Mobil V. Allapattah And Its Lessons For The Class Action Fairness Act, Adam N. Steinman
Faculty Scholarship
The year 2005 witnessed two watershed developments in federal jurisdiction: the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Allapattah Services, Inc. and the enactment of the Class Action Fairness Act (CAFA). Allapattah and CAFA raise the same fundamental question: how should courts interpret a statute whose text would expand federal jurisdiction far beyond what Congress apparently intended? In Allapattah, the Court confronted this question in resolving an aspect of the supplemental jurisdiction statute that had deeply divided both the judiciary and academia. CAFA's expansion of federal jurisdiction over class actions will require courts to struggle with this question …