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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 …