Statutory Interpretation Quotes

By judicial conservative, I mean a judge who does not advance any political or policy preferences, but whose approach to constitutional and statutory interpretation involves fidelity to the text of the Constitution and adherence to the original understanding of that document or to the intent of its drafters.

… The cloak of racism surrounding the actions of the Brotherhood in refusing membership to Negroes and in entering into and enforcing agreements discriminating against them, all under the guise of Congressional authority, still remains. No statutory interpretation can erase this ugly example of economic cruelty against colored citizens of the United States.… A sound democracy cannot allow such discrimination to go unchallenged. Racism is far too virulent today to permit the slightest refusal, in the light of a Constitution that abhors it, to expose and condemn it wherever it appears in the course of a statutory interpretation.

It is in no way remarkable, and in no way a vindication of textual evolutionism, that taking power from the people and placing it instead with a judicial aristocracy can produce some creditable results that democracy might not achieve. The same can be said of monarchy and totalitarianism. But once a nation has decided that democracy, with all its warts, is the best system of government, the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.

In short, Zweigen and Kotz summarise the differences between the Common Law and the Civil Law succinctly: To the lawyers from the Continent of Europe, English law has always been something rich and strange. At every step he comes across legal institutions, procedures, and traditions which have no counterpart in the Continental legal world with which he is familiar. Contrariwise, he scans the English legal scene in vain for much that seemed to him to be an absolute necessity in any functioning system, such as a civil code, a commercial code, a code of civil procedure, and an integrated structure of legal concepts rationally ordered. He finds that legal technique, instead of being directed primarily in interpreting statutory texts or analysing concrete problems so as to `fit them into the system` conceptually, is principally interested in precedents and types of case; it is devoted to the careful and realistic discussion of live problems and readier to deal in concrete and historical terms than think systematically or in the abstract.

A specific statutory provision that contravenes a general constitutional injunction or prohibition is invalid.

In statutory interpretation there is, for example, the rule of lenity, whereby ambiguity in a criminal law is resolved in favor of the defendant; and in interpretation of private contracts there is the rule that ambiguity will be construed contra proferentem, against the party that drafted the instrument.

the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.

Generally, three approaches to the law codes of the ancient Near East are adduced. Some scholars see them as idyllic collections of judicial problems and solutions. Others see them as thematic guides meant to serve judges, as juridical training texts. Yet others see them as the king’s statements of self-justification to posterity or to the gods concerning the just character of his reign.9 Whether these putative “laws” indeed served a statutory purpose or, as is more commonly accepted, were statements of juridical philosophy, we may legitimately see them as reflections of wider systems of thought and ideology. When we read a particular “law,” it does not stand on its own, available for immediate interpretation, but must be understood as just one element of the culture in which it is embedded.10 Turning