Law Commons^™

Are They All Textualists Now?, Austin Peters

Northwestern University Law Review

Recent developments at the U.S. Supreme Court have rekindled debates over textualism. Missing from the conversation is a discussion of the courts that decide the vast majority of statutory interpretation cases in the United States—state courts. This Article uses supervised machine learning to conduct the first-ever empirical study of the statutory interpretation methods used by state supreme courts. In total, this study analyzes over 44,000 opinions from all fifty states from 1980 to 2019.

This Article establishes several key descriptive findings. First, since the 1980s, textualism has risen rapidly in state supreme court opinions. Second, this rise is primarily attributable …

The Nagging In Our Ears And Original Public Meaning, Perry Dane

Marquette Law Review

The debate over how to understand the meaning of legal texts once pitted intentionalism against a variety of other views united by the conviction that a legal enactment takes on a meaning not reducible to anybody’s mental state. Both these approaches are supported by powerful intuitions. This Article does not try to referee between them. Instead, it takes aim at a third set of views— theories of “original public meaning”—that in recent decades has upended the traditional debate and has now become gospel for the new majority on the United States Supreme Court.

How The First Paragraph Of Violence And The Word Killed The Law As Literature Movement, Brett G. Scharffs

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Two Types Of Empirical Textualism, Kevin Tobia, John Mikhail

Brooklyn Law Review

Modern textualist and originalist theories increasingly center interpretation around the “ordinary” or “public” meaning of legal texts. This approach is premised on the promotion of values like publicity, fair notice, and democratic legitimacy. As such, ordinary meaning is typically understood as a question about how members of the general public understand the text—an empirical question with an objective answer. This essay explores the role of empirical methods, particularly experimental survey methods, in these ordinary meaning inquiries. The essay expresses optimism about new insight that empirical methods can bring, but it also cautions against the view that these methods will deliver …

In Defense Of (Circuit) Court-Packing, Xiao Wang

Michigan Law Review Online

Proposals to pack the Supreme Court have gained steam recently. Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg endorsed a court-packing plan at the start of his campaign, and several other candidates also indicated a willingness to consider such a plan, including Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar. Legal scholars have similarly called upon Congress to increase the size of the Supreme Court, particularly following the heated confirmations of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. These suggestions for Court reform have only gotten more pronounced with the recent passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the subsequent nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, and the …

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 …

Digital Realty, Legislative History, And Textualism After Scalia, Michael Francus

Pepperdine Law Review

There is a shift afoot in textualism. The New Textualism of Justice Scalia is evolving in response to a new wave of criticism. That criticism presses on the tension between Justice Scalia’s commitment to faithful agency (effecting the legislature’s will) and his rejection of legislative history in the name of ordinary meaning (which ignores legislative will). And it has caused some textualists to shift away from faithful agency, even to the point of abandoning it as textualism’s grounding principle. But this shift has gone unnoticed. It has yet to be identified or described, let alone defended, even as academic and …

If The Text Is Clear—Lexical Ordering In Statutory Interpretation, Adam M. Samaha

Notre Dame Law Review

Most courts now endorse lexical ordering for statutory cases. That is, a limited set of top-tier sources, if adequately clear, are supposed to establish statutory meaning. Lower-tier sources are held in reserve for close calls. Examples include legislative history and deference to agency positions, which often are demoted into tiebreaking roles. In fact, some such hierarchy of sources is approved by working majorities at the U.S. Supreme Court and more than forty state supreme courts. Although popular today, lexically ordered interpretation has risen and fallen before. Indeed, we should pause to reconsider whether these instructions are justified and whether judges …

The Rhetorical Canons Of Construction: New Textualism's Rhetoric Problem, Charlie D. Stewart

Michigan Law Review

New Textualism is ascendant. Elevated to prominence by the late Justice Antonin Scalia and championed by others like Justice Neil Gorsuch, the method of interpretation occupies an increasingly dominant place in American jurisprudence. Yet, this Comment argues the proponents of New Textualism acted unfairly to reach this lofty perch. To reach this conclusion, this Comment develops and applies a framework to evaluate the rhetoric behind New Textualism: the rhetorical canons of construction. Through the rhetorical canons, this Comment demonstrates that proponents of New Textualism advance specious arguments, declare other methods illegitimate hypocritically, refuse to engage with the merits of their …

Interpretation As Statecraft: Chancellor Kent And The Collaborative Era Of American Statutory Interpretation, Farah Peterson

Maryland Law Review

No abstract provided.

Both Sides Of The Rock: Justice Gorsuch And The Seminole Rock Deference Doctrine, Kevin O. Leske

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Despite being early in his tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch has already made his presence known. His October 16, 2017 statement respecting the denial of certiorari in Scenic America, Inc. v. Department of Transportation garnered significant attention within the legal community. Joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Gorsuch questioned whether the Court’s bedrock 2-part test from Chevron, U.S.A. v. NRDC—whereby courts must defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statutory term—should apply in the case.

Justice Gorsuch’s criticism of the Chevron doctrine was not a surprise. In the …

"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 …

Corpus Linguistics: Misfire Or More Ammo For The Ordinary - Meaning Canon?, John D. Ramer

Michigan Law Review

Scholars and judges have heralded corpus linguistics—the study of language through collections of spoken or written texts—as a novel tool for statutory interpretation that will help provide an answer in the occasionally ambiguous search for “ordinary meaning” using dictionaries. In the spring of 2016, the Michigan Supreme Court became the first to use corpus linguistics in a majority opinion. The dissent also used it, however, and the two opinions reached different conclusions. In the first true test for corpus linguistics, the answer seemed to be just as ambiguous as before.

This result calls into question the utility of corpus linguistics. …

The Scrivener’S Error, Ryan D. Doerfler

Northwestern University Law Review

It is widely accepted that courts may correct legislative drafting mistakes, i.e., so-called scrivener’s errors, if and only if such mistakes are “absolutely clear.” The rationale is that if a court were to recognize a less clear error, it might be “rewriting” the statute rather than correcting a technical mistake.

This Article argues that the standard is much too strict. The current rationale ignores that courts can “rewrite,” i.e., misinterpret, a statute both by recognizing an error and by failing to do so. Accordingly, because the current doctrine is designed to protect against one type of mistake (false positives) but …

Is The Chief Justice A Tax Lawyer?, Stephanie Hoffer, Christopher J. Walker

Pepperdine Law Review

In our contribution to this symposium on King v. Burwell, we explore two aspects of the Chief Justice’s opinion where it is hard to ignore the fingerprints of a tax lawyer. First, in the Chief’s approach to statutory interpretation one sees a tax lawyer as interpreter with an approach that tracks tax law’s substance-over-form doctrine. Second, as to King’s sweeping administrative law holding, the Chief crafts a new major questions doctrine that could significantly cut back on federal agency lawmaking authority. Yet he seems to develop this doctrine against the backdrop of tax exceptionalism, and thus this development may have …

Fun With Administrative Law: A Game For Lawyers And Judges, Adam Babich

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

The practice of law is not a game. Administrative law in particular can implicate important issues that impact people’s health, safety, and welfare and change business’ profitability or even viability. Nonetheless, it can seem like a game. This is because courts rarely explain administrative law rulings in terms of the public purposes and policies at issue in lawsuits. Instead, the courts’ administrative law opinions tend to turn on arcane interpretive doctrines with silly names, such as the “Chevron two-step” or “Chevron step zero.” To advance doctrinal arguments, advocates and courts engage in linguistic debates that resemble a smokescreen—tending to obscure …

Judge Posner's Simple Law, Mitchell N. Berman

Michigan Law Review

The world is complex, Richard Posner observes in his most recent book, Reflections on Judging. It follows that, for judges to achieve “sensible” resolutions of real-world disputes—by which Judge Posner means “in a way that can be explained in ordinary language and justified as consistent with the expectations of normal people” (p. 354)—they must be able to navigate the world’s complexity successfully. To apply legal rules correctly and (where judicial lawmaking is called for) to formulate legal rules prudently, judges must understand the causal mechanisms and processes that undergird complex systems, and they must be able to draw sound factual …

Judicial Deference To Administrative Interpretations Of Law, Antonin Scalia

Journal of the National Association of Administrative Law Judiciary

No abstract provided.

When Good Enough Is Not Good Enough, Karl Stampfl

Michigan Law Review

According to conventional wisdom, the state of statutory interpretation is not strong. Its canons of construction-noscitur a sociis, ejusdem generis, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, reddendo singula singulis, and more than a few others-are a morass of Latin into which many law students and even judges have sunk. Its practitioners are unprincipled. Its doctrines are muddied. Its victims are many. In short, the system is broken-unless, of course, it is not. In The Language of Statutes: Laws and Their Interpretation, Lawrence M. Solan slices through the rhetoric, the fighting, and the law-review-article histrionics in an attempt to show that the …

Text(Plus-Other-Stuff)Ualism:Textualists' Perplexing Use Of The Attorney General's Manual On The Administrative Procedure Act, K. M. Lewis

Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative Law

Textualist judges, such as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, are well known for their outspoken, adamant refusal to consult legislative history and its analogues when interpreting ambiguous provisions of statutory terms. Nevertheless, in administrative law cases, textualist judges regularly quote the Attorney General’s Manual on the Administrative Procedure Act, an unenacted Department of Justice document that shares all the characteristics of legislative history that textualists find odious: unreliability, bias, and failure to pass through the bicameralism and presentment processes mandated by the U.S. Constitution. As a result, judges that rely on the Manual in administrative law cases arguably reach …

Against Dictionaries: Using Analogical Reasoning To Achieve A More Restrained Textualism, Jason Weinstein

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

This Note argues that new textualists should abandon dictionaries as a source for legal interpretation. Textualists believe in restricting judges to the intent discernible from the words of a statute and contend that legislative history is unacceptable as a source of this intention. Both of these sentiments lead textualists to dictionaries as the intuitively correct solution for ambiguities in a text. The author argues, however, that dictionaries by their very nature cannot help discern between reasonable definitions at the margins of meaning. The use of dictionaries in these situations allows for a sham formalism, unrestrictive in result and unrevealing of …

Reply To Judge Easterbrook: Judicial Discretion And Statutory Interpretation, Steven J. Cleveland

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reply To Judge Easterbrook: Regarding History As A Judicial Duty, Harry F. Tepker

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Second Annual Henry Lecture: Judicial Discretion In Statutory Interpretation, Frank H. Easterbrook

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Reply To Judge Easterbrook: The Unsupported Delegation Of Conflict Adjudication In Erisa Benefit Claims Under The Guise Of Judicial Deference, Donald T. Bogan

Oklahoma Law Review

No abstract provided.

Textualism, The Unknown Ideal?, William N. Eskridge Jr.

Michigan Law Review

In May 1997, the New York Knickerbockers basketball team was poised to reach the finals of its division in the National Basketball Association (NBA). The Knicks led the rival Miami Heat by three games to two and needed one more victory to win the best-of seven semifinal playoff series. Game six would be in New York; with their star center, Patrick Ewing, playing well, victory seemed assured for the Knicks. A fracas during game five changed the odds. During a fight under the basket between Knicks and Heat players, Ewing left the bench and paced in the middle of the …

Things Judges Do: State Statutory Interpretation, Judith S. Kaye

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews, Stephen L. Wasby, Herbert A. Johnson

Vanderbilt Law Review

The Courts and Social Policy Author: Donald L. Horowitz

Reviewed by Stephen L. Wasby

Donald Horowitz's The Courts and Social Policy is a serious effort to deal with the question of judicial capacity. Horowitz talks first of the expansion of judicial responsibility, which he thinks is a departure from the traditional exercise of the judicial function, and then explores the sources of this growth, particularly expansive statutory interpretation. He believes that courts do not do well at interpreting the mixes of statutes, regulations, and local arrangements with which they are faced more and more frequently. "Griggs v. Duke Power Co.," …