Statutory Interpretation Stories
Authors:
Eskridge Jr., William N. / Frickey, Philip P. / Garrett, Elizabeth
Edition:
1st
Copyright Date:
2011
17 chapters
have results for Statutory Interpretation Stories
Statutory Interpretation Stories 14 results (showing 5 best matches)
- STATUTORY INTERPRETATION STORIES
- The Story of Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892): Spirit and History in Statutory Interpretation, Carol Chomsky
- The Story of Flood v. Kuhn (1972): Dynamic Statutory Interpretation, At the Time, Stephen F. Ross
- Contributors to Statutory Interpretation Stories
- The Story of Steelworkers v. Weber (1979): Statutory Text, Spirit, and Practical Reasoning, Philip P. Frickey and William N. Eskridge, Jr.
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Contributors to Statutory Interpretation Stories 8 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is the Newton D. Baker–Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. He has authored or co-authored numerous articles on statutory interpretation that have appeared in leading law reviews and social science journals. Before becoming a law professor, he clerked for Judge Gerhard Gesell of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., and for Justice Harry Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court. He was associated with the firm of Bredhoff and Kaiser in Washington, and served for six years as chief counsel and staff director of the Senate Subcommittee on Labor. Professor Brudney has taught comparative statutory interpretation at Ohio State and also as a visitor at Oxford University.
- is the Frances R. and John J. Duggan Professor of Law, Political Science and Public Policy. She is also the co-director of the USC–Caltech Center for the Study of Law and Politics. She is the co-author of the fourth edition of the leading casebook on legislation and statutory interpretation,
- is a retired Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. He has taught legislation for some 20 years and is the author of a Foundation Press casebook on statutory interpretation. His books include
- is the Betts Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, where he has taught since 1971. He graduated Yale Law School in 1964, and from 1975–1977 was the first general counsel of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Although principally a scholar of administrative law, since 1977 he has taught Columbia’s introductory course in legal methods (which stresses legislation as the foundation of contemporary lawyering) and, for the last decade, legislation. His published writings include numerous essays on statutory interpretation, particularly as it involves the administrative state, and
- Dynamic Statutory Interpretation
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Chapter 1: The Story of Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892): Spirit and History in Statutory Interpretation, Carol Chomsky 32 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is so often cited as creating a revolution in statutory interpretation is not the principles upon which it drew, but the fact that the Court used them in this particular case to ignore the literal language of a statute. It is one thing, after all, to talk of the “spirit” of a statute in order to choose among plausible understandings of ambiguous language. It is quite another to invoke the spirit to justify an interpretation in direct conflict with apparently clear language. Yet, in at least a dozen cases between 1840 and 1889, courts in almost as many jurisdictions—including the United States Supreme Court—did just that, although the literal language was generally trumped by reference to the legislature’s purpose and not by recourse to the legislative history. was not unique, either in the general doctrine it espoused or the degree to which it “ignored” the statutory text.
- From the Big Sleep to the Big Heat: The Revival of Theory in Statutory Interpretation
- is an important case in sports law, and also much derided in the popular literature, for its perceived faults in rigidly adhering to an outmoded precedent that baseball was not subject to the requirements of the Sherman Antitrust Act and for unduly admiring our national pastime. Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s majority opinion, refusing to overturn precedent because of baseball’s “unique characteristics and needs” and Congress’ “positive inaction” in considering but never enacting legislation with regard to the judicially created exemption, illustrates and illuminates some important issues in the legisprudence of statutory interpretation. Professor Stephen F. Ross concludes that legislative materials and Justice Blackmun’s private papers reveal a dynamic and pragmatic decision based on the justices’ conclusion that applying antitrust to baseball would be detrimental to the sport and that Congress shared their view. The story of
- ’s notoriety lies in the suspicion that Justice Brewer was wrong about the intent of Congress, and that he used legislative intent as a subterfuge for imposing his own meaning, and his personal view of the United States as a religiously inspired nation, on the statute. The Alien Contract Labor Act has long since faded into memory, so the particular statutory interpretation question—whether the church violated the statute—no longer matters. Indeed, it mattered only briefly because Congress amended the statute to explicitly permit contracts to hire ministers from abroad, acting even before the opinion was issued. But the larger questions—whether purpose and spirit should ever trump express statutory language and whether judges can effectively use legislative history to reach better judgments about legislative intent—remain central to the debates about statutory interpretation and can best be explored with a more thorough understanding of the history of the Alien Contract Labor Act...
- became, and remains, an often-cited, and often-criticized, source for one of the main tenets of statutory interpretation: that the express words of a statute should be read with the legislature’s purpose in mind, and circumstances literally within the statute may be excluded from its purview if such exclusion better fulfills that purpose. Justice Anthony Kennedy has referred to the “unhappy genesis” of that doctrine and its “unwelcome potential,” and described the methodology of as “rummag[ing] through unauthoritative materials to consult the spirit of the legislation in order to discover an alternative interpretation of the statute with which the Court is more comfortable.” The “problem with spirits,” he said, “is that they tend to reflect less the views of the world whence they come than the views of those who seek their advice.” is the case you always cite when the statutory text is hopelessly against you.”
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Chapter 2: The Story of Flood v. Kuhn (1972): Dynamic Statutory Interpretation, At the Time, Stephen F. Ross 23 results (showing 5 best matches)
- , often noted for its importance in shaping environmental law, is also a key case in statutory interpretation law. The case involves the conflict between finishing the Tellico Dam and Reservoir, a project of the Tennessee Valley Authority that many characterized as pork-barrel spending, and protecting the habitat of the rare snail darter fish. Although the Supreme Court’s decision halted construction of the nearly finished dam, Congress subsequently passed legislation ordering completion of the reservoir project. Drawing on key legislative materials and judicial documents, Professor Elizabeth Garrett shows how this case illuminates the interactions among the three branches of government on a question of statutory interpretation. Participants in all branches of government were keenly aware of the involvement of the other governmental actors and made their decisions in light of expected reactions by others. This chapter traces the Tennessee Valley Authority’s decision to build the...
- 121–22 (1979). Re statutory interpretation,
- Location and Limits of Dynamic Statutory Interpretation in Modern Judicial Reasoning
- Statutory Interpretation as Practical Reasoning,
- Judicial Candor in Statutory Interpretation,
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Chapter 10: The Story of Geier v. American Honda Motor Co. (2000): Statutes, Regulation, and the Common Law, Peter L. Strauss 21 results (showing 5 best matches)
- the subject of this story, provides a good context in which to consider a welter of issues: the implications for common-law development of an age of statutes and regulation, the impacts of common-law development on statutory meaning, the arguable importance to statutory interpretation of legal understandings prevalent when a statute is enacted, the relevance to preemption questions (if any) of congressional equivocation about the implementation of arguably pre-emptive federal programs, and other contemporary disputes about pre-emption of state law by federal.
- In considering this story, keep in mind the changes the centuries have wrought. When questions of pre-emption first arose, statutes were relatively rare and lawmaking regulators rarer; federal lawmaking authority was thought much more limited than it is today; and most state law emanated from the mouths of judges, through the common law. Consequently, early statements about pre-emption naturally supposed (“presumed”) a relatively limited impact of federal law on state lawmaking in the traditional areas of law reserved to state authority—that is to say, the arena of everyday common law. Today, statutory and regulatory law have displaced the common law (that is, judge-made law) as the chief sources of legal development: We consider the law judges “find,” or make, as subordinate to the law adopted by the politically responsible actors who make up our legislatures and executive agencies. Yet this story presents a federal statute that explicitly denied state legislatures and executives...
- of statutory interpretation, and that these questions were questions for the Court. Common-law rules could constitute “requirements” subject to pre-emption (thus, with Justice Breyer, establishing a majority on this point); she and the three justices joining her would have ignored the FDA’s narrowing regulation on the point since “[t]he statute makes no mention of a requirement of specificity, and there is no sound basis for determining that such a restriction on ‘any requirement’ exists.”
- FDA’s limited resources, however, had led Congress to permit it provisionally to grandfather devices long on the market—even those classed at the highest level of importance and risk—until such time as the rigorous statutory process could be completed. Congress had also created a summary odd. “Medtronic’s sweeping interpretation of the statute would require far greater interference with state legal remedies, producing a serious intrusion into state sovereignty while simultaneously wiping out the possibility of remedy for the Lohrs’ alleged injuries.”
- • an action against a pacemaker manufacturer for the failure of a pacemaker whose design had been provisionally approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration, an agency whose standards and requirements enjoy statutory protection from state variation similar to section 1392(d).
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Chapter 12: The Story of Gonzales v. Oregon (2006): Death, Deference, Deliberation, William N. Eskridge, Jr. 33 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is not a typical statutory interpretation case, but the sources of its distinctiveness—the big normative issues, the many different institutional players, and the complicated statutory scheme—render it a rich source for theoretical discourse. I should like to make three theoretical points about the dynamics of statutory interpretation that go beyond the previous discussion.
- Many Americans, like Tony Miller, believe they have a constitutional right to die. Even though the Supreme Court rejected such a right in 1997, the same pro-choice norm that inspired Oregon voters to popularly adopt the Oregon Death with Dignity Act (ODWDA) in 1994 endures. In 2001, pro-life Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a directive interpreting the Controlled Substances Act of 1970 to make it illegal for physicians to administer controlled substances in connection with aid-indying. The Supreme Court ultimately rejected that interpretation in The Court’s opinion reflects the continuing power of federalism canons of statutory interpretation, the limits of judicial deference to administrative interpretations when constitutional values are at stake, and the pervasive influence of norms in statutory interpretation—even under strict textualist methodologies. This chapter will argue that should be read to reflect a meta-norm of statutory interpretation:
- Most of the debate between Justices Kennedy and Scalia concerned the level of deference the Court ought to afford the attorney general’s interpretation of the CSA. At the outset, Justice Kennedy rejected the government’s argument that special attorney general’s interpretation of the “legitimate medical purpose” language in his office’s own prior regulation. This was a weak argument in part because the regulation simply restated several statutory requirements, including section 830(b)(3)’s definition of “valid prescription” as one “issued for a legitimate medical purpose.” As Kennedy put it, “[a]n agency does not acquire special authority to interpret its own words when, instead of using its expertise and experience to formulate a regulation, it has elected merely to paraphrase the statutory language.” to bootstrap an agency’s interpretation to a special deference unless deference is already merited for
- That normative debates are increasingly played out as statutory interpretation battles does not mean that constitutional jurisprudence is irrelevant; statutory and constitutional interpretations in such cases are typically interconnected.
- It goes to the overheated debate about what “method” the Supreme Court “must” follow in statutory interpretation, especially the debate between “purposivists” and “textualists.” Statutory interpretation is always
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Chapter 7: The Story of Gregory v. Ashcroft (1991): Clear Statement Rules and the Statutory Constitution of American Federalism, Ernest A. Young 32 results (showing 5 best matches)
- This chapter tells this doctrinal story by situating in broader debates about statutory construction and constitutional federalism. After a brief account of the litigation, I trace the prior development of federalism doctrine that led the Court to adopt a strategy based on rules of statutory construction rather than interpretations of the constitutional text. Subsequent cases, which I can canvass only briefly here, have elaborated on the importance of statutory cases for the federal structure and the ways in which judicial adoption of clear statement requirements reinforces that structure. I conclude by examining some open questions regarding the legitimacy and implementation of clear statement rules.
- This statutory strategy for enforcing federalism intrudes somewhat less on the power of Congress than would one of broadly construing the relevant constitutional provisions. Congress can, after all, override a statutory construction that departs from its intentions. But overrides must overcome all the usual hurdles to legislative action, and many judicial interpretations will stick on account of legislative inertia, even if they do, in fact, disserve congressional intent. Professors Eskridge and Frickey are thus right to observe that “by enforcing federalism-based values through statutory interpretation, the Court has not avoided the countermajoritarian difficulty.”
- Statutory Interpretation and Legislative Supremacy
- as part of a more general shift in the Court’s strategy: “[A]s the Supreme Court grew less activist in constitutional interpretation during the 1980s, it grew correspondingly more activist in statutory interpretation. That is, the Court in the 1980s became somewhat more reluctant to
- Seven justices affirmed the court of appeals’ interpretation of the “policymaking” employee exception to cover state judges, but the justices in the majority disagreed about the proper methodology for interpreting the statute. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s majority opinion (joined by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter) concluded that the ADEA’s statutory exception excluded judges, but relied significantly on a “plain statement rule” that disfavored reading federal law to “upset the usual constitutional balance of federal and state powers.” ...’s construction of the statute, but he dissented from the majority’s use of the clear statement rule. In dissent, Justice Harry Blackmun (joined by Justice Thurgood Marshall) both rejected the clear statement rule and the majority’s construction of the statute. To understand why the clear statement rule might matter, it is important first to review the statutory construction...
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Chapter 4: The Story of Steelworkers v. Weber (1979): Statutory Text, Spirit, and Practical Reasoning, Philip P. Frickey and William N. Eskridge, Jr. 45 results (showing 5 best matches)
- are cases that inspired and then illustrated most of the great theoretical debates of the last generation among law professors and judges. Among those debates are those relating to dynamic statutory interpretation, the new textualism, and the role of norms in statutory interpretation.
- Dynamic Interpretation
- Spirit, Letter, and History in Statutory Interpretation
- present opportunities to focus on any number of the great doctrinal themes of statutory interpretation. Among the great doctrinal themes presented in these cases are the “golden rule,” whereby the plain meaning rule sometimes gives way when it directs “unreasonable” as well as “absurd” results; the importance of purpose (or “spirit”) in statutory interpretation; how to use legislative history, and how the same history can support diametrically opposed constructions; the key role that agencies play in the evolution of statutory meanings and the deference judges ought to afford their approaches; and the super-strong weight the Court says it affords statutory, as opposed to constitutional or even common law, precedents.
- was the occasion for a whole new generation to appreciate the Hart and Sacks approach to statutory interpretation and its dynamic potential. Henry Hart and Albert Sacks’ legal process materials posited that the lodestar of statutory interpretation should be the statutory deployed statutory purpose to trump the “literal” meaning of section 703(d), and (following Mike Gottesman’s brilliant
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Chapter 6: The Story of Chevron USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984): Sometimes Great Cases Are Made Not Born, Thomas W. Merrill 44 results (showing 5 best matches)
- introduced the theme of comparative institutional choice into statutory interpretation. Prior to , courts and commentators gradually came to realize that other institutions (such as administrative agencies) may have a comparative advantage as interpreters, at least in some circumstances. This in turn introduced a meta-question into the theory and practice of statutory interpretation, namely determining the “preferred interpreter” before engaging in the process of interpretation. The full implications of this new perspective have yet to be fully assimilated, but it may ultimately revolutionize the process of statutory interpretation.
- , after such an inauspicious beginning, acquire this status as a core precedent of statutory interpretation law? Two explanations seem most plausible. The first focuses on the D.C. Circuit and posits that ’s expanded rule of deference to administrative interpretations, became persistent and eventually successful proselytizers for use of the standard in reviewing agency interpretations of law.
- First, the Court laid down a new two-step framework for reviewing agency statutory interpretations. At what was quickly dubbed “step one,” courts, using “traditional tools of statutory construction,” ask whether Congress had a “specific intention” with respect to the issue at hand. But if no clear congressional intent can be discerned, then the court, at “step two,” determines whether the agency’s interpretation was a “permissible construction of the statute.”
- was decided at a time when the Court’s statutory interpretation opinions were devoted primarily to a search for legislative intentions as revealed by legislative history. The conference notes suggest that the justices thought about statutory interpretation questions the same way in their deliberations.
- , 415 U.S. 199, 231 (1974): “The power of an administrative agency to administer a congressionally created … program necessarily requires the formulation of policy and the making of rules to fill any gap left, implicitly or explicitly, by Congress.” This statement, however, was addressed to agency authority to issue regulations, not the deference owed to agency interpretations of statutes. In the context of determining the deference owed to agency interpretations, the Court had previously applied the arbitrary and capricious standard only in cases in which Congress had delegated authority to the agency to define a statutory term or prescribe a method of executing a statutory provision.
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Chapter 3: The Story of TVA v. Hill (1978): Congress Has the Last Word, Elizabeth Garrett 20 results (showing 5 best matches)
- has shaped statutory interpretation law, as well as environmental law. The case resolved—but only temporarily—the conflict between finishing the Tellico Dam and Reservoir, a project that would be the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) last dam, and protecting the habitat of the unlovely but rare snail darter fish. Others have told the story from the environmental law perspective ; the importance of the case for statutory interpretation demands a different narrative emphasis. To students of interpretation, the case is known first for its emphasis on the plain meaning of the text of the relevant statute, although the Supreme Court’s majority opinion also spent pages analyzing the legislative history. This “soft” plain meaning rule has been contrasted with the more rigorous textualism of some current influential
- interpreted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to allow voluntary race-based affirmative action in the workplace. This landmark employment law precedent is also one of the great statutory interpretation debates of the last century. The debate among lawyers, judges, and citizens raises important questions of interpretation: Should judges never depart from statutory plain meaning, even when it would undermine the statutory purpose? What role should legislative history, statutory precedents, or agency views play in statutory interpretation cases? Does race-based affirmative action contribute to the integration of America’s workforce, or undermine that great project? sheds light on all these questions but provides final answers to none of them. Instead, it has become a much-debated landmark, a litmus test for statutory interpreters in the last generation.
- As a story of statutory interpretation, the Tellico Dam, the snail darter, and the case that they spawned demonstrate that, if it is determined enough, Congress has the last word on federal spending. Moreover, despite internal rules and the judicial canon disfavoring appropriations riders, Congress can achieve its purposes by passing clearly worded provisions within the text of appropriations bills. Whether its decisions will be good national policy—from either an economic or an environmental perspective—or dictated by pork-barrel politics is much less certain and likely to be contested. The final judgment on the tradeoffs that are made is left to the voters, who continue to wrestle with their views of earmarks, public works projects, and environmental policies.
- Overriding Supreme Court Statutory Interpretation Decisions
- The litigation surrounding NEPA’s effect on the Tellico Dam affected our statutory interpretation story in several ways. Perhaps most importantly, the litigation delayed construction for nearly two years, from January 1972 until October 1973. The snail darter was only discovered in August 1973, and the Endangered Species Act (ESA) was
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Chapter 5: The Story of Bob Jones University v. United States (1983): Race, Religion, and Congress’ Extraordinary Acquiescence, Olatunde Johnson 31 results (showing 5 best matches)
- is one of the most consequential statutory interpretation decisions ever rendered, but it was not regarded that way initially. To the justices who heard the case, was a controversy about the validity of the “bubble” concept under the Clean Air Act, not about the division of authority between courts and agencies in the interpretation of statutes. Drawing on Justice Harry Blackmun’s papers, Professor Thomas Merrill shows that the Court was initially closely divided, but Justice John Paul Stevens’ opinion won them over, with no one paying attention to his innovations in the formulation of the court-agency relationship or his invocation of presidential oversight as one reason to regard agencies as more appropriate interpreters than courts. ...a major decision by the D.C. Circuit, however, and, after establishing itself as a leading case there, it migrated back to the Supreme Court, where it eventually came to be regarded as a landmark decision by the Court that rendered it. The story...
- Dynamic Statutory Interpretation
- Like Bob Jones III, observers often depict the case as a clash of two competing rights: racial equality versus religious free exercise. Yet, if these rights find expression in the case, it is through statutory interpretation. The decision is occupied far less with constitutional doctrine than with determining the plain meaning and purpose behind the tax-exemption statute, and the proper scope of the IRS’ power. Those who have studied the Court’s statutory analysis are often critical of its failure to adhere to the statutory text and its reliance on congressional inaction. But understanding the historical context—how the IRS, the Congress, the White House, and the courts became embroiled in questions involving racial discrimination and private schools—provides, if not a complete defense, crucial context for understanding the Court’s decision.
- If, however, implementing a supposed legislative intent is not the goal of statutory interpretation, the enacting Congress would just provide one possible source of statutory meaning; achieving true coherence in legislation would require that statutes be read against contemporary commitments. Allowing tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory schools would be at odds with contemporary norms against racial discrimination, made manifest in numerous judicial, executive, and administrative pronouncements, including the Court’s decisions in
- Chief Justice Burger’s final statutory argument was that Congress ratified the decision. While courts should not accord significance to Congress’ failure to act, this was no “ordinary claim of legislative acquiescence.” Here, the chief justice contended, Congress’ “nonaction was significant.” Congress had held numerous hearings on the IRS policy; members had introduced more than thirteen bills to overturn the IRS’ interpretation, but none emerged from committee (even as other changes were made to section 501). These events, Chief Justice Burger concluded, provided “evidence of Congressional approval” of the IRS policy.
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Chapter 9: The Story of Pepper v. Hart (1992): Examining Legislative History Across the Pond, James J. Brudney 37 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Case and Comment: Statutory Interpretation and Parliamentary Intention
- Legislation and Statutory Interpretation
- Laboratories of Statutory Interpretation: Modified Textualism and Methodological Consensus in the States
- to help focus generally worded statutory text, or to prevent “slippage” from agreements reached among key legislators. Thus, although committee reports as aids to statutory interpretation have certain limits,
- or to help interpret delegated or secondary legislation—known as statutory instruments—designed to carry out requirements under European Community would henceforth be permitted as an aid to the interpretation of primary legislation.
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- decided in 1892, is the often-cited source for one of the main tenets of statutory interpretation: that the spirit of a statute may take precedence over its literal words. It is also considered an early authority for the use—and misuse—of legislative history to explain legislative purposes in the search for statutory meaning. The lawsuit resulted from prosecution of the church for violating the Alien Contract Labor Act by hiring an English minister, which led Justice David Brewer to base his opinion for the Court in part on his conclusion that the United States is a “Christian nation” so the statute must not have been intended to extend so far. Justice Brewer’s extended encomium to Christianity in American history, and his own religious background, have encouraged some to see as a prime example of the dangers of turning away from textual analysis to include a problematic invocaan extended look at the legislative history and a review of accepted statutory interpretation methodology...
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Chapter 8: The Story of Chisom v. Roemer (1991): Are Judges “Representatives”?, William D. Popkin 17 results (showing 5 best matches)
- Justice Souter (in a May 22, 1991, memorandum) acknowledged that he found Justice Scalia’s argument “very persuasive” and that he had originally voted in conference to interpret “representatives” to exclude judges because “the concept of ‘dilution’ as the reason for a given group’s political ineffectiveness would be difficult to define or limit with any hope of objectivity” and because “[t]hese problems were to be avoided if possible.” But he was persuaded to change his view because the statutory text in § 2(b) did not admit of a disjunctive reading. He noted that the statutory text was borrowed from the Court’s decision in and that the best interpretation of that language was that the conjunctive “and” in the critical phrase did not admit of an uncoupling disjunctive interpretation (although Justice Souter thought that his conjunctive reading was not “strictly airtight”). Justice Souter concluded that “Congress’s use of this Court’s language adopted the meaning which the Court had...
- The purpose of the 1982 amendment was to override the Court’s interpretation of prior law in which limited the § 2 prohibition to intentional discrimination (the same as the constitutional Equal Protection standard). The 1982 amendment expanded the statutory prohibition to include discriminatory “results,” whether or not intended. The amendment also added the following § 2(b), the critical language of which appears in boldface—specifically, the word “representatives” (interpreted by the Court in
- transformed the way judges and lawyers in Britain approach statutory interpretation by overruling more than 200 years of precedent and allowing courts to consult legislative history when construing enacted laws. The case involved teachers at a private school whose children were educated at one-fifth the fees charged to parents of other students. The question was how that employee benefit should be valued for income tax purposes under an ambiguously worded statute. The 1992 decision by the Law Lords (Britain’s highest court), relying heavily on legislative history, drew sharp academic criticism and triggered spirited debate among leading members of the judiciary. Eighteen years later, the rule of
- The professionalization of the bar in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, starting with the Association of the Bar of the City of New York in 1870 and the American Bar Association in 1878, further advanced the idea that law was a specialized body of knowledge accessible to judicial experts. The doctrinal and political consequences of this appeal to legal science is known to lawyers primarily through the incorporation of common-law property and contract principles into substantive due process (a constitutional development familiarly referred to as Lochnerism), but it also manifest itself in statutory interpretation through the canon that statutes in derogation of the common law should be narrowly construed.
- Professor James J. Brudney makes use of lower court decisions, parliamentary materials, contemporary media accounts, and interviews with key participants to present the story of the case in depth. The chapter then assesses subsequent developments in the Law Lords and explains why—based on differences in legislative process and structure—the U.S. Supreme Court continues to rely on legislative history more often than do the Law Lords. The story of
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Chapter 11: The Story of FDA v. Brown & Williamson (2000): The Norm of Agency Continuity, Theodore W. Ruger 29 results (showing 5 best matches)
- The Court’s opinion by Justice Kennedy, however, gave no deference to Ashcroft’s interpretation, in large part because he had dramatically departed from the views of his predecessor on the specific question of the federal role in banning assisted suicide. More generally, the attorney general’s interpretation diverged from the statements of prior federal officials who had consistently disclaimed federal authority to regulate medical practice. Against this decades-long backdrop, Ashcroft’s policy initiative was “a radical shift,” and one the Court did not permit him to make without express statutory authorization.
- From the Big Sleep to the Big Heat: The Revival of Theory in Statutory Interpretation
- This is the story of that litigation, the FDA’s regulatory initiative that provoked it, and the broader struggle of the American polity to meaningfully regulate an extremely dangerous and extremely popular case resulted in a Supreme Court holding that thwarted the FDA’s jurisdiction over cigarettes absent statutory change. But the case represents only one regulatory front in a much larger battle against tobacco’s pernicious health effects that raged in the 1990s and continues today. Concurrent with the FDA’s efforts to promulgate and defend its regulatory authority in the opinion, Congress by a 2009 statutory amendment has finally given the FDA the authority over tobacco that the Supreme Court denied it almost a decade before.
- Kessler did not embark on his tenure as FDA commissioner in 1990 with the intention of regulating tobacco, or with the legal understanding that the agency could do so without additional statutory authority from Congress. As he recounts the story, a handful of key career staffers first suggested that the FDA consider tobacco regulations in various office conversations that predated Kessler’s reappointment by President Clinton. The clear adverse health impact of cigarette smoking led Kessler and his staff to take the question of FDA regulation seriously, but initially they harbored doubts about the FDA’s existing authority to reach tobacco products. In 1991 Kessler told the National Cancer Advisory
- and related cases are best understood as articulating a kind of non-delegation rule that forces Congress rather than agencies to effectuate key policy shifts, a more recent coda to the story of the FDA and tobacco ought to hearten the Court’s majority. Congress did finally explicitly act on the question of the FDA and tobacco in 2009. In enacting The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which was signed by President Barack Obama in June 2009, Congress created a new title of the FDCA and expressly granted the FDA jurisdiction over tobacco products. Like the 1996 FDA regulations, the new statutory amendments focus heavily on reducing and controlling youth smoking; they also contain a host of marketing and advertising restrictions. Two components of the new statute speak directly to the Court’s 2000 ruling. First, Congress in the statute directs the FDA to reissue the 1996 regulations that the Supreme Court struck down in
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- Publication Date: October 21st, 2010
- ISBN: 9781599415888
- Subject: Legislation & Regulation
- Series: Law Stories
- Type: Overviews
- Description: This title tackles the leading cases in the emerging statutory interpretation canon, as reflected in the casebooks. For each case, the leading scholar provides historical background (including details about the participants), a procedural history of the case, and an analysis of doctrinal and other lessons from the case.
