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Sara's State Procedural Reform: Reading Cts V. Waldburger Through Canons Of Statutory Interpretation, Alfred Light

Alfred Light

This Article takes Justice Antonin Scalia and Professor Bryan A. Garner’s 2012 treatise Reading Law seriously by showing how the Supreme Court applied (or failed to apply) Reading Law’s canons of statutory interpretation in a recent decision evaluating a preemptive provision of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (“CERCLA” or “Superfund”) – 42 U.S.C. §9658 in CTS v. Waldburger. Justice Kennedy applied several semantic and contextual canons: the Ordinary-Meaning Canon, the Fixed-Meaning Canon, the Whole-Text Canon, and the Harmonious Reading Canon. As important, the Court plainly rejected a principle which Reading Law calls a “falsity”: the false notion …