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Full-Text Articles in Law
Avoidance Creep, Charlotte Garden
Avoidance Creep, Charlotte Garden
Faculty Articles
At first glance, constitutional avoidance—the principle that courts construe statutes so as to avoid conflict with the Constitution whenever possible—appears both unremarkable and benign. But when courts engage in constitutional avoidance, they frequently construe statutory language in a manner contrary to both its plain meaning and to the underlying congressional intent. Then, successive decisions often magnify the problems of avoidance—a phenomenon I call “avoidance creep.” When a court distorts a statute in service of constitutional avoidance, a later court may amplify the distortion, incrementally changing both statutory and constitutional doctrine in ways that are unsupported by any existing rationale for …
Killing Jim Crow And The Undead Nondelegation Doctrine With Privately Enforceable Federal Regulations, Brian J. Sutherland
Killing Jim Crow And The Undead Nondelegation Doctrine With Privately Enforceable Federal Regulations, Brian J. Sutherland
Seattle University Law Review
This Comment has two goals. First, it seeks to contextualize, within the reality of institutional racism, the debate over the private enforceability of federal regulations under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. On the one hand, the regulations promulgated pursuant to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already include many provisions which effectively confront the vestiges of racially discriminatory law and policy. The logical inference is that these perfectly proscriptive federal regulations ought to be enforceable, through private lawsuits if necessary, in order to enjoin and deter such policy and procedure. On the other hand, federal administrative agencies have …
Demystifying Ambiguous Statutes With The Maxims Of Statutory Interpretation: A Closer Look At J.D. Tan, Llc V. Summers, Alexander Kleinberg
Demystifying Ambiguous Statutes With The Maxims Of Statutory Interpretation: A Closer Look At J.D. Tan, Llc V. Summers, Alexander Kleinberg
Seattle University Law Review
Section I begins with a brief discussion of the maxims of statutory interpretation and an explanation of how courts employ them to determine an enigmatic law's meaning. Section II provides a history of the J.D. Tan case, including a chronicle of the underlying dispute between the principal debtor, William Summers, and the assighee of the judgment holder, J.D. Tan, LLC. Section III explains why the statute at issue in J.D. Tan, RCW 6.17.020(3), was ambiguous when this case was decided, and how this statute was in need of judicial interpretation via application of the maxims of statutory interpretation. Section IV …