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Including a discussion of legislative powers, constitutional regulations relative to the forms of legislation and to legislative procedure.
This book reviews the primary rules courts apply to discern a statute's meaning. However, each matter of interpretation before a court presents its own challenges, and there is no unified, systematic approach used in all cases. While schools of statutory interpretation may vary on what factors should be considered, all approaches start (if not necessarily end) with the language and structure of the statute itself. In analyzing a statute's text, courts are guided by the basic principle that a statute should be read as a harmonious whole, with its separate parts being interpreted within their broader statutory context.
In an ideal world, the laws of Congress--known as federal statutes--would always be clearly worded and easily understood by the judges tasked with interpreting them. But many laws feature ambiguous or even contradictory wording. How, then, should judges divine their meaning? Should they stick only to the text? To what degree, if any, should they consult aids beyond the statutes themselves? Are the purposes of lawmakers in writing law relevant? Some judges, such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, believe courts should look to the language of the statute and virtually nothing else. Chief Judge Robert A. Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit respectfully disagrees. In Judging Statutes, Katzmann, who is a trained political scientist as well as a judge, argues that our constitutional system charges Congress with enacting laws; therefore, how Congress makes its purposes known through both the laws themselves and reliable accompanying materials should be respected. He looks at how the American government works, including how laws come to be and how various agencies construe legislation. He then explains the judicial process of interpreting and applying these laws through the demonstration of two interpretative approaches, purposivism (focusing on the purpose of a law) and textualism (focusing solely on the text of the written law). Katzmann draws from his experience to show how this process plays out in the real world, and concludes with some suggestions to promote understanding between the courts and Congress. When courts interpret the laws of Congress, they should be mindful of how Congress actually functions, how lawmakers signal the meaning of statutes, and what those legislators expect of courts construing their laws. The legislative record behind a law is in truth part of its foundation, and therefore merits consideration.
In this groundbreaking book, Scalia and Garner systematically explain all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation in an engaging and informative style with hundreds of illustrations from actual cases. Is a burrito a sandwich? Is a corporation entitled to personal privacy? If you trade a gun for drugs, are you using a gun in a drug transaction? The authors grapple with these and dozens of equally curious questions while explaining the most principled, lucid, and reliable techniques for deriving meaning from authoritative texts. Meanwhile, the book takes up some of the most controversial issues in modern jurisprudence. What, exactly, is textualism? Why is strict construction a bad thing? What is the true doctrine of originalism? And which is more important: the spirit of the law, or the letter? The authors write with a well-argued point of view that is definitive yet nuanced, straightforward yet sophisticated.
This work discusses the constitutional foundations that govern the relations between the legislature and the courts and the issues of separation of powers with respect to statutes. Concepts of legislative meaning, intent, purpose, and context are described in detail.
Suitable for students or practitioners, this authoritative overview of the legislative process and statutory interpretation moves smoothly and understandably between the theoretical and the practical. It contains in-depth discussion of such topics as theories of legislation and representation, electoral and legislative structures, extrinsic sources for statutory interpretation, and substantive canons of statutory interpretation. Reap the benefits of the authors' experience, opinions, and insight and gain a working knowledge of the area.
Contrary to traditional theories of statutory interpretation, which ground statutes in the original legislative text or intent, legal scholar William Eskridge argues that statutory interpretation changes in response to new political alignments, new interpreters, and new ideologies. It does so, first of all, because it involves richer authoritative texts than does either common law or constitutional interpretation: statutes are often complex and have a detailed legislative history. Second, Congress can, and often does, rewrite statutes when it disagrees with their interpretations; and agencies and courts attend to current as well as historical congressional preferences when they interpret statutes. Third, since statutory interpretation is as much agency-centered as judgecentered and since agency executives see their creativity as more legitimate than judges see theirs, statutory interpretation in the modern regulatory state is particularly dynamic. Eskridge also considers how different normative theories of jurisprudence--liberal, legal process, and antiliberal--inform debates about statutory interpretation. He explores what theory of statutory interpretation--if any--is required by the rule of law or by democratic theory. Finally, he provides an analytical and jurisprudential history of important debates on statutory interpretation.
Mastering Statutory Interpretation explains the methods of interpreting statutes, including a discussion of the various theories and canons of interpretation. The book begins by exploring these theories and identifying the sources of meaning the theorists use to interpret statutes, including intrinsic, extrinsic, and policy-based. Throughout, the text uses the major cases in each area of study to explain how the canons work in practice. Finally, each chapter provides a concise roadmap and summary to introduce and encapsulate the most important material. The second edition adds one new chapter to address the administrative issues that faculty teaching legislation and regulation need, as well as a running hypothetical to help students better implement what they are learning.
Statutes are now the predominant source of law in our society, the primary resource for legal decisions in all kinds and at all levels of legal practice. This book is about the process of making and justifying legal decisions based on the interpretation and application of statutes. It introduces and explains the methods of interpretation --the "traditional tools of statutory interpretation" as Justice Stevens called them -used -by legal professionals in interpreting and applying statutes. It covers techniques such as precedent, relation to context, canons of construction, and more contentiously, legislative history. The focus is on explanation and justification with the aim of conveying the sort of understanding that will enable the reader to analyze novel cases and evaluate unfamiliar arguments. About the author: Michael Sinclair, Professor Emeritus of New York Law School, is a native of New Zealand where he received his early education, a B.A. (Economics), B.A. Hon's. (First class in philosophy), and a Ph.D. in Philosophy, writing a dissertation on Ludwig Wittgenstein, "Language Games and Forms of Life." In 1974, with the aid of a Fulbright Fellowship, he followed a girl to the United States, where he studied logic and grammar for two years before going to law school. They are still married and have one daughter, a musician. He received a J.D. (magna cum laude, Order of the Coif) from the University of Michigan Law School in 1978 and after three years in practice began teaching in 1981. He taught and wrote in a variety of subjects -contracts, torts, commercial law, intellectual property, banking, jurisprudence, wills and trusts, administrative law, and statutory interpretation -before retiring in 2012. He and his wife Karen, an anthropologist, live in Northport, near the tip of Michigan's Leelanau Peninsula.