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Two Kinds of Plain Meaning
Get PDFIs plain meaning so plain? This is not meant to be a philosophical question, but one deserving serious legal analysis. The plain-meaning rule claims to provide certainty and narrow statutes\u27 domains. The author agrees with, as a relative claim, comparing plain meaning with purposivism. She does not agree that plain-meaning analysis is as easy as its proponents suggest. In this piece, the author teases out two very different ideas of plain meaning--ordinary/popular meaning and expansive/legalist meaning--suggesting that doctrinal analysis requires more than plain-meaning simpliciter. Perhaps more importantly, she argues that plain meaning, as legalist meaning, can quite easily expand a statute\u27s scope, relative to a baseline of ordinary meaning or the status quo ex ante
Making Constitutional Doctrine in a Realist Age
Get PDFIn this article the author considers three examples of modern constitutional doctrine that show how judges have stolen bits and pieces from popularized skepticisms about the job of judging and have molded this stolen rhetoric into doctrine. In the first example, she asks whether constitutional law\u27s recent penchant for doctrinal rules based on clear law could have existed without the modern age\u27s obsession with legal uncertainty. In the second, the author considers whether our contemporary rhetoric of constitutional interests and expectations reflects modern critiques of doctrine as failing to address social needs. In the third, she asks how an offhand reference to the term fundamental could come to describe a legal category defined by courts\u27 own fears of illegitimacy except in an age self-conscious of the judiciary\u27s institutional weaknesses. If the author is right about these examples, it may be that what was once said of modern painting\u27s abstraction--that whatever else it was about, it was about painting --is true of modern doctrine\u27s abstraction as well: that it is about doctrine and doctrine\u27s struggle in an age self-conscious of the possibility of doctrinal failure
The Constitution and Legislative History
Get PDFIn this article, the author provides an extended analysis of the constitutional claims against legislative history, arguing that, under textualists’ own preference for constitutional text, the use of legislative history should be constitutional to the extent it is supported by Congress’s rulemaking power, a constitutionally enumerated power.
This article has five parts. In part I, the author explains the importance of this question, considering the vast range of cases to which this claim of unconstitutionality could possibly apply—after all, statutory interpretation cases are the vast bulk of the work of the federal courts. She also explains why these claims should be of greater concern to a variety of constitutional theorists, particularly those who embrace theories of popular and common law constitutionalism, but as well to originalists.
In part II, the author considers the textualist arguments against the constitutionality of legislative history. Article I, Section 7 provides that any bill must pass the House and the Senate and be presented to the President for veto or signature. As a number of textualists have argued, legislative history is not passed by both houses or signed by the President. Call this the “bicameralism argument.” Her answer to the bicameralism argument lies in a constitutional text that statutory textualists seem to have forgotten: Article I, Section 5 gives explicit power to Congress to set its own procedures, a power that gives legitimacy to legislative history created pursuant to those procedures. In fact, new developments in statutory interpretation theory (decision process theory) suggest that, in some cases, the only way to resolve textual conflict is to consider legislative procedure.
In part III, the author considers a second prominent argument against the constitutionality of legislative history: non-delegation. Critics argue that Congress may not delegate the “legislative power” granted under the Constitution to members or committees, as only the entire Congress may constitutionally exercise that power. Call this the “non-delegation” argument. Again, her response is based on constitutional text: Article I, Section 5 specifically sanctions delegation to less than the whole of Congress; more importantly, there is no general norm against self-delegation stated explicitly or even implicitly in the Constitution. Finally, the author suggests that there is a certain inconsistency in the assertion of these claims: the non-self-delegation and bicameralism arguments can both be used to indict canons of construction, which textualists offer as the leading alternative to legislative history, but which have no supporting text comparable to Article I section 5 in the Constitution.
In part IV, she considers arguments that judges’ use of legislative history violates the separation of powers because it allows the legislature to exceed the bounds of the “judicial power.” This argument can rather easily be turned on its head: in the quotations offered at the beginning of this article, members of Congress argue that judges are exercising the “legislative power” when they rewrite statutes without considering legislative history. As has been argued at length elsewhere, the use of “adjectival” argument in structural controversies—relying upon the terms “legislative, executive, and judicial”—perpetuates a weak understanding of the separation of powers, and one that the Constitution’s own text belies. The separation of powers does not prevent recourse to legislative history; in fact, as the article explains, blindness to legislative history may create different kinds of structural risks—risks to federalism, rather than risks to the separation of powers.
Finally, in part V, the author concludes by suggesting that we should retire the strong form of the legislative history unconstitutionality argument, by which she means the claim that the constitution bars any and all legislative history. Instead, we should far more actively interrogate serious questions about the use of legislative history in particular cases. Can it really be wise—or even constitutional—for a judge to impose a meaning on an ambiguous statute with reference to the state-ments of a filibustering minority, or privilege some texts in ways that violate Congress’s rules? Fidelity to Congress, and the importance of Congress’s constitutional rules—what Francis Lieber once called the “common law” of the Congress—has yet to be theorized within this more pressing, but particular, sphere
Decision Theory and \u3ci\u3eBabbitt v. Sweet Home\u3c/i\u3e: Skepticism About Norms, Discretion, and the Virtues of Purposivism
Get PDFIn this writing, the author applies a “decision theory” of statutory interpretation, elaborated recently in the Yale Law Journal, to Professor William Eskridge’s illustrative case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. In the course of this application, she takes issue with the conventional wisdom that purposivism, as a method of statutory interpretation, is inevitably a more virtuous model of statutory interpretation. First, the author questions whether we have a clear enough jurisprudential picture both of judicial discretion and legal as opposed to political normativity. Second, she argues that, under decision theory, Sweet Home is a far easier case than either Justice Stevens’s or Justice Scalia’s opinions reveal. Finally, the author critiques both opinions for failing to rely on norms borrowed from Congress’s actual decisions in the 1982 Endangered Species Act Amendments. The question then, is not “norms or not,” but whose norms, Congress’s or the courts’, should apply
Law\u27s Constitution: A Relational Critique
Get PDFIt is a simple fact: we begin from others. Without others we, quite literally, could not live, feel, be born. Every mother, every mother\u27s partner, every father, every child, knows this. But law sees these relations as something lesser, as foreign. Mention the word relationship to the average lawyer and she will likely assume that you are talking about sex, dating, or perhaps marriage. She may even wonder what relationship has to do with the law at all.
In this paper, the author wonders whether it is possible to flip that equation, to think of the relational as central, rather than peripheral, to law\u27s most ambitious public projects. Her hypothesis is two-fold: first, that the relational question is known by, and important to, feminism; and, second, that the relational is important beyond feminism, indeed that it is important to our ideas of constitution and law itself. If this is right, then focusing on relationships is far from the marginal project that it is often assumed to be. Indeed, it may allow feminism to predict new ways of seeing law. The author offers examples from her own legal experience--in criminal law and constitutional law--that shows what she calls (for lack of a better term) the relational critique. What she mean by this is two things: (1) that many of the concepts that we see in law, that seem mundane, natural or given, stand as proxies for normative relations; (2) that by disaggregating the natural object--by seeing relations in naturalized descriptions--we can see the law creating/ generating/constituting. Put another way, this paper is about thinking relationally—the author wonders whether it is possible or wise to substitute the relational question for the sameness question or the difference question--not only in cases of concern to feminists but cases elsewhere in the law
Overrides: The Super-Study
Get PDFOverrides should be of interest to a far larger group of scholars than statutory interpretation enthusiasts. We have, in overrides, open inter branch encounters between Congress and the Courts far more typically found in the shadows of everyday Washington politics. Interestingly, Christiansen and Eskridge posit the court-congress relationship as more triadic than dyadic given the role played by agencies. One of their more interesting conclusions is that agencie are the big winners in the override game: agencies were present in seventy percent of the override cases and the agency view prevailed with Congress and against the Supreme Court in three-quarters of those overrides. When the Supreme Court rejects the statutory interpretations of agencies, supported by the Solicitor General, it does so at its peril. This suggests that the common wisdom—that agencies often have a better handle than courts on Congress’s meaning because of their closer connections with Congress (through oversight, expertise about the statute, informal communications, etc.)—is true. It also suggests that broad congressional delegation to agencies—traditionally viewed with suspicion by lawyers—may come with a silver interpretive lining.
The author makes no attempt to survey the richness of this gargantuan study nor the extraordinary effort it must have taken. It should be of interest to readers of court–congress interaction, students of agency action, scholars of statutory interpretation, and the separation of powers. Her aim is not to repeat the study, or even to summarize it, but to provide a parsimonious and helpful lens through which we may understand its intellectual assumptions and accomplishments. In part I, the author addressees its methodological virtues and vices. In part II, she posits a fairly parsimonious model that helps to explain the rich Christiansen and Eskridge findings. In part III, the author provides a brief comment on the authors’ recommendations for future action
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Toward a New Constitutional Anatomy
Get PDFThere is an important sense in which our Constitution\u27s structure is not what it appears to be--a set of activities or functions or geographies, the \u27judicial or the executive or the legislative power, the truly local and the truly national. Indeed, it is only if we put these notions to the side that we can come to grips with the importance of the generative provisions of the Constitution: the provisions that actually create our federal government; that bind citizens, through voting, to a House of Representatives, to a Senate, to a President, and even, indirectly, to a Supreme Court. In this article, the author contends that the deep structure of the Constitution is not a set of functions or geographies, but rather a political economy of relations between the governed and the governing. Based on standard assumptions common in institutional economics, she argues that these relations create incentives that can help us predict real (rather than simply theoretical) risks to structural change in actual cases involving both the separation of powers and federalism. By considering the risk from shifting relations not to activity-description but instead to majorities and minorities, we may come closer to understanding real risks to shifting power, from states to nation and from one national department to another. To this end, against the backdrop of constitutional law, the author brings to bear the converging meanings of history, political science, and lost constitutional text, all of which reveal that the canonical view of our Constitution is quite partial to courts and provides an incomplete picture of our Constitution as a whole
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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