Law Commons^™

Costs Of No Codes, James Maxeiner

All Faculty Scholarship

Codification is a ubiquitous feature of modern legal systems. Codes are hailed as tools for making law more convenient to find and to apply than law found in court precedents or in ordinary statutes. Codes are commonplace in most countries. The United States is anomalous. It does not have true codes. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when many countries adopted systematic civil, criminal and procedural codes, the United States considered, but did not adopt such codes.

This Article discusses the absence of codes in American law, identifies American substitutes for codes, relates the history of attempts to create …

The Reconceptualization Of Legislative History In The Supreme Court, Charles Tiefer

All Faculty Scholarship

In 1995, the Supreme Court began to embrace a approach to interpreting Congressional intent. From that year forward, the Breyers-Stevens model of legislative history, or "institutional legislative history," has seen significant success, emerging in the shadows of the success Justice Scalia's enjoyed while promoting his brand of textualism in the early 1990s. In developing a new way to view Congressional intent, Justices Breyers and Stevens synthesize information gathered from congressional report details, preferably attached to bill drafting choices, thereby renouncing Scalia's reliance on the purposes espoused by the Congressional majority. This new approach, the author contends, rejuvenated the court's approach …