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As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute means.
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Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
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Exogenous and blind interpretation of statutes, topped with hustled implementation of laws by the corporates, leads only to more turmoil and less productivity.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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Broad as the power of Congress is under the Enforcement Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, RFRA contradicts vital principles necessary to maintain separation of powers and the federal balance.” The Rehnquist Court majority used similar interpretations of Section 5 and of the Commerce Clause to overturn other statutes, including the Violence Against Women Act, which permitted women who were victims of gender-motivated violence to sue their attackers in federal court (United States v.
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Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
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Hence a necessary consequence of the physical and, at the same time, the moral predisposition in us, the latter being the basis and the interpreter of all religion, is that in the end religion will gradually be freed from all empirical determining grounds and from all statutes which rest on history and which through the agency of ecclesiastical faith provisionally unite men for the requirements of the good; and thus at last the pure religion of reason will rule over all, “so that God may be all in all.
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Immanuel Kant (Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone)
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Further, the OIC seeks to impose this unfounded interpretation on general human rights law and international law. The truth is that there is no basis in human rights law for the implementation of blasphemy statutes or their equivalent. The restriction of freedom of speech considered “blasphemous” is anti-Constitutional[86] and antithetical to international standards of genuine human rights.[87]
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Deborah Weiss (The Organization of Islamic Cooperation's Jihad on Free Speech (Civilization Jihad Reader Series Book 3))
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the American system of checks and balances disperses federal lawmaking authority among multiple, overlapping political forums. As a result, federal policymaking power is shared: Congress is given the primary power to draft laws, subject to the president's veto and judicial review; the executive branch is given the primary power to implement laws, subject to congressional oversight and judicial review; and the courts have the primary power to interpret laws, subject to a variety of legislative and executive checks, including the appointment process, budgetary powers, and the passage of "overrides"-laws that explicitly reverse or materially modify existing judicial interpretations of statutes.
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Mark C. Miller (Making Policy, Making Law: An Interbranch Perspective (American Governance and Public Policy series))
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A statute limits the time for appeal to 60 days after judgment has been entered: The purpose is to close off appeal, and terminate the litigation, after 60 days. (The purposivist might find it to be closing off appeal after a reasonable time, which is specified as 60 days in normal circumstances—but special cir-cumstances may provide an exception.)
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Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
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As we have said before, the fact that a statute can be ‘applied in situations not expressly anticipated by Congress does not demonstrate ambiguity. It demonstrates breadth.
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Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
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Generally included under the generic heading of common law is the judicial interpretation of statute law.
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Philip Norton (British Polity, The, CourseSmart eTextbook)
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Because Miranda warnings were deemed a constitutional requirement, Congress could not eliminate them by statute. Therefore Section 3501 was unconstitutional because “Congress may not legislatively supersede our decisions interpreting and applying the Constitution.”5 Why didn’t the conservative majority
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Erwin Chemerinsky (Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights)
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The French lawyer is simply a man extensively acquainted with the statutes of his country; but the English or American lawyer resembles the hierophants of Egypt, for, like them, he is the sole interpreter of an occult science.
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Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America)
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in 2000 the Supreme Court declared this law unconstitutional, stressing that Congress by statute cannot overrule the Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.
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Erwin Chemerinsky (Presumed Guilty: How the Supreme Court Empowered the Police and Subverted Civil Rights)
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the Constitution. As in the United States, statute and common law are subject to judicial interpretation, but there is no power of judicial review, at least not as the term is understood in the United States. The courts can influence and to some extent mold certain provisions through their interpretation of statute and common law. Indeed, their use of common
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Philip Norton (British Polity, The, CourseSmart eTextbook)
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As I have stressed repeatedly, the law, like other rules, is by its nature incomplete. Within the legal system, we use the mechanism of interpretation, often carried out by courts, to complete it in particular cases—to determine how to apply it to particular cases. In order to apply the law consistently, it must be interpreted consistently. Incompleteness is a problem not just of statutes and contracts, but also of the common law. Indeed, we can understand the common law as a mechanism for incremental decentralized completion of incomplete legal rules.
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Joel P. Trachtman (The Tools of Argument: How the Best Lawyers Think, Argue, and Win)
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Throughout his argument, Stewart was adamant that because it was a corporate-funded, prolonged attack of Clinton’s capacity for office, and that it was intended to air on television, Hillary: The Movie was subject to the ban on electioneering communications. Since candidates had previously elected to air extended “infomercial” ads in the past (most notably, Ross Perot in 1992 and 1996), the government’s position was that a communication expressly advocating the defeat of a candidate was certainly electioneering, regardless of how long it lasted. Stewart said, It may be rare to find a 90-minute film that is so unrelenting in its praise or criticism of a particular candidate that it will be subject to no reasonable interpretation other than to vote for or against that person, but when you have that, as I think we do here, there’s no constitutional distinction between the 90-minute film and the 60-second advertisement. The government’s rationale was that the film clearly met the definition of “express advocacy” that the Court had outlined in WRTL, since the only reasonable interpretation of the film was that it was encouraging viewers not to support Senator Clinton. This assertion was part of a crucial exchange in the argument. To Stewart’s claim that an ad and the film were functionally equivalent, Justice Kennedy was quick to respond that “If we think that … this film is protected, and you say there’s no difference between the film and the ad, then the whole statute must be declared” unconstitutional.
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Conor M. Dowling (Super PAC!: Money, Elections, and Voters after Citizens United (Routledge Research in American Politics and Governance))
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That was the same case in which the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously concluded that, if they adhered to the insane interpretation of this terrible statute that was being defended by the Department of Justice, you could be prosecuted for using a few drops of vinegar to poison your child’s goldfish.
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James Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
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In the law receiver’s perspective (the corporate, employer, employees, citizens, legal fraternity, and the society at large) paramount quandary is of “right interpretation”.
Interpretation of statutes and promulgations receives a major blow when it comes to swift compliance within a short time period of intense promulgations.
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Henrietta Newton Martin
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On behalf of the deference under the Administrative Procedure Act, it is said that Congress is not constitutionally barred from authorizing deference—as if Congress can detract from the office of the judges. The office of the judges, however, was an element of the Constitution’s grant of judicial power, and it required the judges to exercise independent judgment in accord with the law of the land. Put another way, when the Constitution authorized judicial power, it took for granted that judges, by their nature, had such a duty.19 This judicial duty was recognized very early, because it was the foundation of what nowadays is called “judicial review.” When writing about the judicial power of North Carolina in 1786, James Iredell explained: “The duty of the power I conceive, in all cases, is to decide according to the laws of the state,” and as “the constitution is a law of the state,” a statute “inconsistent with the constitution is void.” Or as put by John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, where “both the law and the constitution apply to a particular case” the court “must determine which of these conflicting rules governs the case,” this being “of the very essence of judicial duty.”20 Judicial review, in other words, is entailed by judicial duty—a duty that accompanies judicial power and that requires judges to exercise their own independent judgment in following the law. And another result of this duty is that a mere statute cannot justify the judges in abandoning their independent judgment or in following extralegal rules or interpretations. As if this were not enough, the U.S. Constitution adds that no person shall be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” If this means anything, it surely requires a judge not to defer to one of the parties, let alone to defer systematically to the government. Nonetheless, on the basis of a mere statute, the judges generally defer. The next step is to examine the varieties
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Philip Hamburger (Is Administrative Law Unlawful?)
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So where there is a conflict between a general provision and a specific one, whichever was enacted later might be thought to prevail. But that analysis disregards the principle behind the general/specific canon—namely, that the two provisions are not in conflict, but can exist in harmony. The specific provision does not negate the general one entirely, but only in its application to the situation that the specific provision covers. Hence the canon does apply to successive statutes.
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Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
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Where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.
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Antonin Scalia (Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts)
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The other members of the legal fraternity especially the court officers/lawyers should be encouraged to aid in interpretation of statutes by handing down suggestions to the legislators through a proper channel which shall be specially devised for the purpose. When legal experts fail to exercise their professional prudence, the purpose of law, receives a major blow, and on the contrary leads to chaos and exogenous delivery of justice oblivious of the intention of the legislature/law maker in promulgating a particular statute.
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Henrietta Newton Martin (General Laws and Interpretation-Sultanate of Oman-Part I Perspicuous Edition -2014)
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In the corporate realm, where several laws are in operation, implementation receives a blow when it comes to interpretation and understanding the spirit and purpose of any particular law that may have been designed and promulgated for meeting a particular purpose in the light of the anomalies prevalent in the sector at any given point of time.Thus I would call for establishing a sagacious method of study of law, and study of interpretation of statutes so as to develop the legal fabric.
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Henrietta Newton Martin (General Laws and Interpretation-Sultanate of Oman-Part I Perspicuous Edition -2014)
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the creative power of the judicial system in shaping the law cannot be overlooked entirely. This factor needs to be consciously accepted as one of the elements in shaping the legal system and the laws, however, without least opposing the Supremacy of the Sovereign statutes promulgated in the land.The chasm in the contemporaneous legal scheme and the legislation in Oman harbingers for such a practice to secure the ends of justice, probability of decisions to be given primacy rather than approximation to a model format.
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Henrietta Newton Martin (General Laws and Interpretation-Sultanate of Oman-Part I Perspicuous Edition -2014)
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Sometimes Congress is helpful. There’s a difference between a case that involves constitutional interpretation, where the Court says, “This is what the Constitution means.” Well, that’s what it means until the Court overrules its decision or there’s a constitutional amendment. But when you’re dealing with statutes like our principal employment discrimination law, Title VII, if the Court gets it wrong, Congress can fix it.
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Jeffrey Rosen (Conversations with RBG: Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Life, Love, Liberty, and Law)