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Full-Text Articles in Law
Statutory Misinterpretations: A Legal Autopsy, Eric Schnapper
Statutory Misinterpretations: A Legal Autopsy, Eric Schnapper
Articles
If the Supreme Court is willing to learn from past mistakes, the Court would find it particularly instructive to re-examine the now quite numerous civil rights decisions which have failed to survive congressional scrutiny. The United States Reports are today littered with the corpses of short-lived opinions purporting to interpret federal anti-discrimination statutes; most were dead on arrival in the bound volumes. October Term 1988 was a veritable Pickett's Charge of conservative misinterpretation. Patterson v. McLean Credit Union briefly displaced and destroyed much of section 1981; Public Employees Retirement System v. Betts temporarily overran parts of the Age Discrimination in …
Judicial Deference To Administrative Agencies' Legal Interpretations After Lechmere, Inc. V. Nlrb, Susan K. Goplen
Judicial Deference To Administrative Agencies' Legal Interpretations After Lechmere, Inc. V. Nlrb, Susan K. Goplen
Washington Law Review
In Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB, the Supreme Court held that when interpreting administrative statutes, the Court will defer to its own previous interpretations rather than defer to administrative agencies' interpretations of statutes. Thus, the Court determined that stare decisis is dominant over judicial deference to administrative agencies. The Court decided Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB wrongly. The rationales for deference to agencies exist whether or not the courts have addressed the statute in question. Therefore, courts should apply the doctrine of judicial deference even when courts have previously interpreted a statute.