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Full-Text Articles in Law
The Paradoxical Impact Of Scalia's Campaign Against Legislative History, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Kristen M. Renberg
The Paradoxical Impact Of Scalia's Campaign Against Legislative History, Stuart Minor Benjamin, Kristen M. Renberg
Cornell Law Review
Beginning in 1985, Judge and then Justice Antonin Scalia advocated forcefully against the use of legislative history in statutory interpretation. Justice Scalia's position, in line with his textualism, was that legislative history was irrelevant and judges should avoid invoking it. Reactions to his attacks among Justices and prominent circuit judges had an ideological quality, with greater support from ideological conservatives. In this Article, we consider the role that political party and timing ofjudicial nomination played in circuit judges' use of legislative history. Specifically, we hypothesize that Republican circuit judges were more likely to respond to the attacks on legislative history …
Signing Statements And Presidentializing Legislative History, John M. De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz
Signing Statements And Presidentializing Legislative History, John M. De Figueiredo, Edward H. Stiglitz
Cornell Law Faculty Publications
Presidents often attach statements to the bills they sign into law, purporting to celebrate, construe, or object to provisions in the statute. Though long a feature of U.S. lawmaking, the President has avowedly attempted to use these signing statements as tool of strategic influence over judicial decisionmaking since the 1980s—as a way of creating “presidential legislative history” to supplement and, at times, supplant the traditional congressional legislative history conventionally used by the courts to interpret statutes. In this Article, we examine a novel dataset of judicial opinion citations to presidential signing statements to conduct the most comprehensive empirical examination of …