Law Commons^™

Chief Justice Rehnquist, Pluralist Theory, And The Interpretation Of Statutes, Thomas W. Merrill

Faculty Scholarship

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist is often viewed as the ultimate "political" judge. According to Mark Tushnet, for example, "[o]ne could account for perhaps ninety percent of Chief Justice Rehnquist' s bottom-line results by looking, not at anything in the United States Reports, but rather at the platforms of the Republican Party." Nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than with respect to issues of statutory interpretation. When I informed colleagues I was working on an article about Chief Justice Rehnquist's theory of statutory interpretation, the almost universal response was: "What theory?"

Contrary to the common view that Chief Justice Rehnquist …