Law Commons^™

The Adam Walsh Act's Sex Offender Registration And Notification Requirements And The Commerce Clause: A Defense Of Congress's Power To Check The Interstate Movement Of Unregistered Sex Offenders, Matthew S. Miner

Villanova Law Review

The article discusses the Adam Walsh Act specifically the debate on the constitutionality of the Sex Offender Registration and Notification Act (SORNA) under the Commerce Clause. SORNA aims to set up a unified registry system to monitor sex abusers' movements across states facilitating crime prevention and resolution. It cites U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have established the authority of Congress to regulate interstate travel and illegal activities even if the threat is local in nature.

Passive-Voice References In Statutory Interpretation, Anita S. Krishnakumar

Faculty Publications

The Supreme Court regularly references grammar rules when interpreting statutory language. And yet grammar references play a peculiar role in the Court's statutory cases—often lurking in the background and performing corroborative work to support a construction arrived at primarily through other interpretive tools. The inevitable legisprudential question triggered by such references is, why does the Court bother? If grammar rules provide merely a second, third, or fourth justification for an interpretation reached through other interpretive canons, then what does the Court gain—or think it gains—by including such rules in its statutory analysis?

This essay examines these questions through the lens …

Two Kinds Of Plain Meaning, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Is plain meaning so plain? This is not meant to be a philosophical question, but one deserving serious legal analysis. The plain-meaning rule claims to provide certainty and narrow statutes' domains. The author agrees with, as a relative claim, comparing plain meaning with purposivism. She does not agree that plain-meaning analysis is as easy as its proponents suggest. In this piece, the author teases out two very different ideas of plain meaning--ordinary/popular meaning and expansive/legalist meaning--suggesting that doctrinal analysis requires more than plain-meaning simpliciter. Perhaps more importantly, she argues that plain meaning, as legalist meaning, can quite …

Misunderstanding Congress: Statutory Interpretation, The Supermajoritarian Difficulty, And The Separation Of Powers, Victoria Nourse

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Every lawyer's theory of statutory interpretation carries with it an idea of Congress, and every idea of Congress, in turn, carries with it an idea of the separation of powers. In this article, the author critiques three dominant academic theories of statutory interpretation--textualism, purposivism, and game theory--for their assumptions about Congress and the separation of powers. She argues that each academic theory fails to account for Congress's dominant institutional features: "the electoral connection," the "supermajoritarian difficulty," and the "principle of structure-induced ambiguity." This critique yields surprising conclusions, rejecting both standard liberal and conservative views on statutory interpretation.

"Plain" meaning, it …

Against Constitutional Mainstreaming, Bertrall L. Ross

Bertrall L Ross

Courts interpret statutes in hard cases. Statutes are frequently ambiguous, and an enacting legislature cannot foresee all future applications of a statute. The Supreme Court in these cases often chooses statutory interpretations that privilege the values that it has emphasized in its recent constitutional jurisprudence. In doing so, the Court rejects alternative interpretations that are more consistent with the values embodied in more recently enacted statutes. This is constitutional mainstreaming—an interpretive practice that molds statutes toward the Court’s own preferred values and away from values favored by legislative majorities.

In addition to providing a novel descriptive framework for what the …

Severability Of Statutes, Tom Campbell

Tom Campbell

Courts legislate when they engage in "severability analysis", allowing part of a law to continue in force, after having struck down other parts as unconstitutional. This is flawed for the same reason that the legislative veto and the executive line-item veto are flawed. All involve creating a legislative outcome without the joint approval of both houses and the executive. The practice derives from an analogy to contract enforcement, where a court will try to preserve part of a contract when the rest is unenforceable. However, the analogy is imperfect because Congress and the state legislature remain in a position to …