Law Commons^™

Cracking The Whole Code Rule, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Over the past three decades, since the late Justice Scalia joined the Court and ushered in a new era of text-focused statutory analysis, there has been a marked move towards the holistic interpretation of statutes and “making sense of the corpus juris.” In particular, Justices on the modern Supreme Court now regularly compare or analogize between statutes that contain similar words or phrases—what some have called the “whole code rule.” Despite the prevalence of this interpretive practice, however, scholars have paid little attention to how the Court actually engages in whole code comparisons on the ground.

This Article provides the …

Meta Rules For Ordinary Meaning, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

(Excerpt)

“Ordinary meaning” is a notoriously undefined concept in statutory interpretation theory. Courts and scholars sometimes describe ordinary meaning as the meaning that a “reasonable reader” would ascribe to the statutory language at issue, but it remains unclear how judges and lawyers should go about identifying such meaning. Over the past few decades, as textualism has come to dominate statutory interpretation, courts increasingly have employed dictionary definitions as (purportedly) neutral, and sometimes dispositive, evidence of ordinary meaning. And in the past few years especially, some judges and scholars have advocated using corpus linguistics — patterns of usage across various English …

Legislating Morality: Moral Theory And Turpitudinous Crimes In Immigration Jurisprudence, Abel Rodríguez, Jennifer A. Bulcock

Faculty Publications

Congress could have framed the country’s immigration policies in any number of ways. In significant part, it opted to frame them in moral terms. The crime involving moral turpitude is among the most pervasive and pernicious classifications in immigration law. In the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is virtually ubiquitous, appearing everywhere from the deportability and mandatory detention grounds to the inadmissibility and naturalization grounds. In effect, it acts as a gatekeeper for those who wish to enter and remain in the country, obtain lawful permanent residence, travel abroad after admission, or become United States citizens. With limited exceptions, noncitizens …

Legal Sets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In this Article, I propose that the practices of legal reasoning and analysis are helpfully understood as being primarily concerned not with rules or propositions, but with sets. This Article develops a formal model of the role of sets in the practices of legal actors in a common-law system defined by a recursive relationship between cases and rules. In doing so, it demonstrates how conceiving of legal doctrines as a universe of discourse comprising (sometimes nested or overlapping) sets of cases can clarify the logical structure that governs marginal cases and help organize the available options for resolving such cases …

The Canon Wars, Anita S. Krishnakumar, Victoria F. Nourse

Faculty Publications

Canons are taking their turn down the academic runway in ways that no one would have foretold just a decade ago. Affection for canons of construction has taken center stage in recent Supreme Court cases and in constitutional theory. Harvard Dean John Manning and originalists Will Baude and Stephen Sachs have all suggested that principles of “ordinary interpretation” including canons should inform constitutional interpretation. Given this newfound enthusiasm for canons, and their convergence in both constitutional and statutory law, it is not surprising that we now have two competing book-length treatments of the canons—one by Justice Scalia and Bryan Garner, …

In The Shadow Of A Myth: Bargaining For Same-Sex Divorce, Noa Ben-Asher

Faculty Publications

This Article explores a relatively new phenomenon in family law: same-sex divorce. The Article’s central claim is that parties to the first wave of same-sex divorces are not effectively bargaining against the backdrop of legal dissolution rules that would govern in the absence of an agreement. In other words, to use Robert Mnookin and Lewis Kornhauser’s terminology, they are not “bargaining in the shadow of the law.” Instead, the Article argues, many same-sex couples today bargain in the shadow of a myth that same-sex couples are egalitarian—that there are no vulnerable parties or power differentials in same-sex divorce.

The Article …

Reconsidering Substantive Canons, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This paper provides the first empirical study of the Roberts Court’s use of substantive canons in its statutory interpretation cases. Based on data from 295 statutory interpretation cases decided by the Roberts Court during its first six-and-a-half terms, the paper argues that much of the conventional wisdom about substantive canons of statutory construction is wrong, or at least overstated with respect to the modern Supreme Court. Substantive canons — such as the rule of lenity, the avoidance canon, or the presumption against extraterritorial application of domestic laws — have long been criticized as undemocratic judge-made rules that defeat congressional intent, …

Dueling Canons, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This Article offers the first targeted study of the Supreme Court’s use of canons and other tools of statutory interpretation in a “dueling” manner—that is, in both the majority and dissenting opinions in the same case, to support opposing outcomes. Taking its inspiration from Karl Llewellyn’s celebrated list of canons and countercanons, this Article examines how often and in what ways the members of the Roberts Court counter each other’s references to particular interpretive tools when disagreeing about the proper reading of a statute. Many of the Article’s findings are unexpected and undermine the assumptions made by some of the …

The Sherlock Holmes Canon, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Many of the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation cases infer meaning from Congress’s failure to comment in the legislative record. Colorfully referred to as the “dog that did not bark” canon, after a Sherlock Holmes story involving a watchdog that failed to bark while a racehorse was being stolen, the interpretive presumption holds as follows: if a statutory interpretation would significantly change the existing legal landscape, Congress can be expected to comment on that change in the legislative record; thus, a lack of congressional comment regarding a significant change can be taken as evidence that Congress did not intend that interpretation. …

Judge Posner, Judge Wilkinson, And Judicial Critique Of Constitutional Theory, Marc O. Degirolami, Kevin C. Walsh

Faculty Publications

Judge Richard Posner’s well-known view is that constitutional theory is useless. And Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III has lambasted constitutional theory for the way in which its “cosmic” aspirations threaten democratic self-governance. Many other judges hold similar views. And yet both Posner and Wilkinson — in the popular press, in law review articles, and in books — have advocated what appear to be their own theories of how to judge in constitutional cases. Judicial pragmatism for Posner and judicial restraint for Wilkinson seem to be substitutes for originalism, living constitutionalism, political process theory, and so on. But both Posner and …

Disclosure As Distribution, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This brief response to the work of Professors Omri Ben-Shahr and Carl Schneider on mandated disclosure regimes investigates the normative criteria underlying their claim that those regimes are failures. Specifically, it unpacks the pieces of those authors' implicit cost-benefit analysis, revealing inherently normative judgments about desert and responsibility at the core of their (or any) critique of disclosure regimes. Disclosure regimes may aim to improve human decisionmaking behaviors, but those behaviors are influenced in non-deterministic ways by cognitive capacities that are heterogeneously distributed among subjects of the regimes. Accordingly, any claim regarding the normative desirability of disclosure regimes (or any …

Marks, Morals, And Markets, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

The prevailing justification for trademark law depends on economic arguments that cannot account for much of the law's recent development, nor for mounting empirical evidence that consumer decisionmaking is inconsistent with assumptions of rational choice. But the only extant theoretical alternative to economic analysis is a Lockean "natural rights" theory that scholars have found even more unsatisfying. This Article proposes a third option. I analyze the law of trademarks and unfair competition as a system of moral obligations between producers and consumers. Drawing on the contractualist tradition in moral philosophy, I develop and apply a new theoretical framework to evaluate …

Accentuate The Normative: A Response To Professor Mckenna, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

In his article, “A Consumer Decision-Making Theory of Trade-mark Law,” 98 Va. L. Rev. 67 (2012), Professor Mark McKenna makes two significant claims. The first is that the dominant Law and Economics theory of trademark law—the search-costs theory of the Chicago School—is in some way connected to recent undesirable expansions of trademark rights. The second is that a preferable theory of trademark law—one that would result in more tightly circumscribed and socially beneficial notions of trademark rights—would take consumer decision making, rather than search costs, as its guiding principle. I find myself sympathetic to these arguments, and yet I believe …

The Anti-Messiness Principle In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Many of the Supreme Court's statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove "messy" for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid "messiness" has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court's use of "anti-messiness" arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of "messiness" avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the …

Against Theories Of Punishment: The Thought Of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This paper reflects critically on what is the near-universal contemporary method of conceptualizing the tasks of the scholar of criminal punishment. It does so by the unusual route of considering the thought of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, a towering figure in English law and political theory, one of its foremost historians of criminal law, and a prominent public intellectual of the late Victorian period. Notwithstanding Stephen's stature, there has as yet been no sustained effort to understand his views of criminal punishment. This article attempts to remedy this deficit. But its aims are not exclusively historical. Indeed, understanding Stephen's ideas …

The Ethics Of Unbranding, Jeremy N. Sheff

Faculty Publications

This Essay explores the ethical implications of the phenomenon of "unbranding" that has recently been discussed in popular and scholarly literature. It compares two extant definitions of unbranding and examines each under alternative ethical theories of trademark law, specifically deontological and consequentialist theories. With respect to each of these theories, the Essay examines the ethical questions raised by the existence of asymmetric information between brand owners and consumers. This includes asymmetries not only with regard to information about products, but also with regard to information about consumer decision-making processes. The latter asymmetry presents conflicts between deontological and consequentialist conclusions regarding …

Fiqh And Canons: Reflections On Islamic And Christian Jurisprudence, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

Although American scholarship has begun to address both Christian and Islamic jurisprudence in a serious way, virtually none of the literature attempts to compare the place of law in these two world religions. This Essay begins to compare Islamic and Christian conceptions of law and suggests some implications for contemporary debates about religious dispute settlement. Islam and Christianity are subtle and complex religions. Each has competing strands; each has evolved over millennia and expressed itself differently over time. Moreover, although systematic treatments of Islamic law are beginning to appear in English, much remains available only in languages, like Arabic, that …

The Hidden Legacy Of Holy Trinity Church: The Unique National Institution Canon, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

This Article explores an underappreciated legacy of the Supreme Court's (in)famous decision in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. Although Holy Trinity has been much discussed in the academic literature and in judicial opinions, the discussion thus far has focused almost exclusively on the first half of the Court's opinion—which declares that the "spirit" of a statute should trump its "letter"—and relies on legislative history to help divine that spirit. Scholars and jurists have paid little, if any, attention to the opinion's lengthy second half. In that second half, the Court tells a detailed narrative about the country's …

Representation Reinforcement: A Legislative Solution To A Legislative Process Problem, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

One of the most valuable—and disturbing—insights offered by public choice theory has been the recognition that wealthy, well-organized interests with narrow, intense preferences often dominate the legislative process while diffuse, unorganized interests go under-represented. Responding to this insight, legal scholars in the fields of statutory interpretation and administrative law have suggested that the solution to the problem of representational inequality lies with the courts. Indeed, over the past two decades, scholars in these fields have offered up a host of John Hart Ely-inspired representation reinforcing "canons of construction," designed to encourage judges to use their role as statutory interpreters to …

Faith In The Rule Of Law, Marc O. Degirolami

Faculty Publications

This is an essay on Brian Z. Tamanaha's Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law (2006).

For all but the most unflinching consequentialist, "instrumentalism" tends to draw mixed reviews. So it does from Brian Tamanaha. His book, Law as a Means to an End: Threat to the Rule of Law, documents with measured diffidence the ascendancy and current reign of "legal instrumentalism," so entrenched an understanding of law that it is "taken for granted in the United States, almost a part of the air we breathe." Professor Tamanaha shows that in our legal theorizing, …

Whose Public, Whose Order? Imperium, Region, And Normative Friction, Christopher J. Borgen

Faculty Publications

Theories of international law and politics are a product of their times. They focus on the issues of the day (or of the immediate past) and their assumptions are often the assumptions of the society in which they were born. Perhaps that it is why so many international relations scholars were surprised by the end of the Cold War: Their theories were so informed by bipolarity that they were unable to see the actual changes that would transform the state system. As international relations scholars are re-assessing their theories in a post-Cold War world, lawyers may do the same concerning …

Formalism In American Contract Law: Classical And Contemporary, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

It is a universally acknowledged truth that we live in a formalist era—at least when it comes to American contract law. Much more than the jurisprudence of a generation ago, today's cutting-edge work in American contract scholarship values the formalist virtues of bright-line rules, objective interpretation, and party autonomy. Policing bargains for substantive fairness seems more and more an outdated notion. Courts, it is thought, should refrain from interfering with market exchanges. Private arbitration has displaced courts in the context of many traditional contract disputes. Even adhesion contracts find their defenders, much to the chagrin of communitarian scholars.

This is …

Rediscovering Williston, Mark L. Movsesian

Faculty Publications

This Article is an intellectual history of classical contracts scholar Samuel Williston. Professor Movsesian argues that the conventional account of Williston's jurisprudence presents an incomplete and distorted picture. While much of Williston's work can strike a contemporary reader as arid and conceptual, there are strong elements of pragmatism as well. Williston insists that doctrine be justified in terms of real-world consequences, maintains that rules can have only presumptive force, and offers institutional explanations for judicial restraint. As a result, his scholarship shares more in common with today's new formalism than commonly supposed. Even the under-theorized quality of Williston's scholarship—to contemporary …

On The Evolution Of The Canonical Dissent, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

Legal theorists increasingly have come to recognize and study the existence of a constitutional canon composed of highly authoritative legal texts that command special reverence in the law. Among these highly authoritative texts are a series of dissenting opinions—e.g., Justice Holmes's in Lochner v. New York, and Justice Harlan's in Plessy v. Ferguson—that ironically are more famous than the majority opinions in most other cases. This Article examines the evolution of the dissenting canon, seeking to explain both the methods by which various dissenting opinions became canonized and the motivating factors behind these canonizations.

Specifically, the Article argues that the …