Law Commons^™

Canons To Create Ties And Canons To Break Them, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

The human spirit can be deeply stirred by art for its own sake, but there is special magic when the esthetic combines with the practical. It was in this sense that Charles W. Eliot, for decades president of Harvard University, once declared that he found great beauty in the shape of the handle of an American ax. In the same fashion, beauty resides in well-made statutory interpretation arguments.

Over the millennia, scores of principles of construction have evolved, all of them useful in the right contexts. Usually, more than one principle can plausibly be maintained to apply to the given …

The 'No Surplusage' Canon In State-Local Tax Litigation, Steve R. Johnson

Scholarly Publications

Previous installments of this column have examined numerous canons or conventions of statutory interpretation in their application to state and local tax controversies. This installment considers another canon: the precept that courts should prefer interpretations that render no part of a statute superfluous. A recent treatise phrased the principle thus:

If possible, every word and every provision [of an enactment] is to be given effect. . . . None should be ignored. None should needlessly be given an interpretation that causes it to duplicate another provision or to have no consequence.

The first part below describes the canon generally. The …