Law Commons^™

Impeding Reentry: Agency And Judicial Obstacles To Longer Halfway House Placements, S. David Mitchell

Faculty Publications

Part I of this article details the Bureau of Prisons' rules and policies governing inmate placement, including the most recent iteration. Part II examines Chevron27 and the Bureau of Prisons' extraordinary justification exception rule. Part III turns to the threshold matter of obtaining judicial access to challenge the Bureau of Prisons' new rule, with Part III.A arguing that the federal courts should relax their standards when faced with exceptions to the exhaustion requirement and Part III.B arguing for the adoption of a federal public importance exception to the mootness doctrine. The article concludes that these changes will further Congress' dual …

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 …