Jurisprudence Commons^™

"We Are All Textualists Now": The Legacy Of Justice Antonin Scalia, Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

One of my favorite extra-judicial activities is meeting with law students, and it is a pleasure to be with you today. But it is a special privilege to come back to the Jamaica campus of St. John’s College from which I graduated 60 years ago, long before the Law School had moved here from Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn, and when there was only one building on this former golf course.

I was honored to call Justice Scalia a role model and friend. What I hope to convey to you today, however, is the effect Justice Scalia’s tenure on the …

Change, Creation, And Unpredictability In Statutory Interpretation: Interpretive Canon Use In The Roberts Court's First Decade, Nina A. Mendelson

Michigan Law Review

In resolving questions of statutory meaning, the lion’s share of Roberts Court opinions considers and applies at least one interpretive canon, whether the rule against surplusage or the presumption against state law preemption. This is part of a decades-long turn toward textualist statutory interpretation in the Supreme Court. Commentators have debated how to justify canons, since they are judicially created rules that reside outside the statutory text. Earlier studies have cast substantial doubt on whether these canons can be justified as capturing congressional practices or preferences; commentators have accordingly turned toward second-order justifications, arguing that canons usefully make interpretation constrained …