Law Commons^™

The Warp And Woof Of Statutory Interpretation: Comparing Supreme Court Approaches In Tax Law And Workplace Law, James J. Brudney, Corey Distlear

Faculty Scholarship

Debates about statutory interpretation-and especially about the role of the canons of construction and legislative history-are generally framed in one-size-fits-all terms. Yet federal judges including most Supreme Court Justices-have not approached statutory interpretation from a methodologically uniform perspective. This Article presents the first in-depth examination of interpretive approaches taken in two distinct subject areas over an extended period of time. Professors Brudney and Ditslear compare how the Supreme Court has relied on legislative history and the canons of construction when construing tax statutes and workplace statutes from 1969 to 2008. The authors conclude that the Justices tend to rely on …