Faculty Bibliography

In Federalist No. 78, Alexander Hamilton argued for locating interpretive authority over law separately from those institutions tasked with formulating it. Hamilton’s vision, never accurate as a description of American practice, has not been credible for a long time. To the extent massive power is still allocated to judges, our legal institutions have been out of step with our legal theory, which has long regarded them as political actors and policymakers. More practically, every Term it is clearer and clearer that the role of the Supreme Court in statutory cases (including checking administrative rule-making and other processes) is, if anything, more menacing than its role in the rare instances when it deploys its heaviest weaponry of constitutional invalidation. Against progressive calls to reclaim the judiciary, this Article completes our proposal to disempower courts exercising lawmaking authority—including when they are interpreting statutes alone. Indeed, the same considerations that counsel the constitutional disempowerment of courts counsel their statutory disempowerment, and the allocation or reallocation of their authority over law to politically accountable agents. The heart of our Article offers a survey of court disempowerment strategies and tools, which are comparable to though not identical with the disempowerment mechanisms that have been proposed in the arena of constitutional reform. Such strategies and tools are appealing in the short term; but in the long term, a fuller rethinking our desirable institutional plan of legal interpretation beckons. Available and existing disempowerment strategies for courts are best conceived as early and partial versions of full-scale allocation of interpretive authority over law to “political” branches and openly political control.

The idea of disregarding the U.S. Supreme Court—simply ignoring its decisions—has become a flash point. “Americans will not tolerate defiance of the institution and the rule of law,” remarked one conservative law professor, irate about the possibility that President Joe Biden or other political officials might engage in such behavior. Who has defied the Supreme Court in the past? If leading examples include Andrew Jackson the ethnic cleansing populist or George Wallace the Southern segregationist, the answer has to be: no one good.

This Article proposes a new framework for evaluating doctrines that assign legal significance to whether a statutory text is “clear.” Previous scholarship has failed to recognize that such doctrines come in two distinct types. The first, which this Article calls evidence rules, instructs a court to “start with the text,” and to proceed to other sources of statutory meaning only if absolutely necessary. Because they structure a court’s search for what a statute means, the question with each of these evidence rules is whether adhering to it aids or impairs that search—the character of the evaluation is, in other words, mostly epistemic. The second type, which this Article calls decision rules, instead tells a court to decide a statutory case on some ground other than statutory meaning if, after considering all the available sources, what the statute means remains opaque. The idea underlying these decision rules is that if statutory meaning is uncertain, erring in some direction constitutes “playing it safe.” With each such doctrine, the question is thus whether erring in the identified direction really is “safer” than the alternative(s)—put differently, evaluation of these doctrines is fundamentally practical. With the new framework in place, this Article then goes on to address the increasingly popular categorical objection to “clear” text doctrines. As this Article explains, the objection that nobody knows how clear a text has to be to count as “clear” rests partly on a misunderstanding of how “clarity” determinations work—such determinations are sensitive to context, including legal context, in ways critics of these doctrines fail to account for. In addition, the objection that “clear” text doctrines are vulnerable to willfulness or motivated reasoning is fair but, as this Article shows, applies with equal force to any plausible alternative.

Ryan Doerfler argues that real change requires us to strip the court of its authority while Elie Mystal writes that the best approach is to flood the court with more justices.

Doerfler discusses how to fix the US Supreme Court. With the leak of a draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization formally overruling Roe v. Wade, progressives’ worst fears about an ever more reactionary Supreme Court appear set to come true. The Supreme Court’s refusal to guarantee meaningful, positive rights to US citizens (let alone noncitizens) goes far beyond abortion. In addition to failing to provide positive rights, the Supreme Court has, throughout its history, actively impeded Congress from providing such rights through ordinary legislation. By invoking its power under Article III to make "exceptions" to the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over most cases and its total discretion over the existence of "inferior" federal courts, Congress could–and should–insulate legislation like the Women’s Health Protection Act from judicial invalidation by including a provision withdrawing from any court the right to consider challenges to the constitutionality of that law.

The ghost of John Hart Ely haunts the American liberal constitutional imagination. Despite the failure long ago of any progressive constitutional vision in an increasingly conservative Supreme Court, Ely’s conjectures about the superiority of judges relative to legislatures in the protection of...

Are "canons of construction" embarrassing? For a long time, the answer was "yes." Exposed as "contradictory" by Karl Llewellyn, a generation of legal thinkers understood interpretive canons to be so malleable in their application as to operate mostly as pretext. Rather than bring predictability to statutory decisions, the availability of more than one interpretive canon in nearly any appellate case meant that a canon's invocation worked mostly to obscure the choice (conscious or not) by judges between legally permissible outcomes. Interpretive canons were thus tools of legal mystification, providing the appearance of law to what were, ultimately, acts of discretion.

The Commission on the Supreme Court’s findings may end up helping to set reform in motion, rather than stopping it in its tracks.

His new book refuses to recognize that the court is political.

Amid a racial uprising and calls for “political revolution,” why pretend that our political disputes turn on the “best” reading of an eighteenth-century text, the Constitution?

Progressives are taking Supreme Court reform seriously for the first time in almost a century. Owing to the rise of the political and academic left following the 2008 financial crisis and the hotly contested appointments of Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, progressives increasingly view the Supreme Court as posing a serious challenge to the successful implementation of ambitious legislation. Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation to take Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat after her death in fall 2020 brought these once-marginal concerns to the forefront of American political debate, prompting a promise from now-President Joseph Biden, on the eve of his election, to form a national commission for court reform. Despite this once-in-a-lifetime energy around the idea of court reform, the popular and academic discussion of how to reform the Supreme Court has been unduly constrained. Even if the commission proves to be a ploy to postpone reform, it is crucial to clarify the debate around possible ends and means of reform, for the debate is unlikely to die out. This is the case with regard to the mechanism and the purpose of reform alike. On the left, historical memory has limited debate almost entirely to “court-packing.” Meanwhile, the center has occupied itself with how to restore the Supreme Court’s legitimacy by rescuing the institution from its regrettable slide into partisanship. And now, as the Court appears to moderate itself in an effort to preempt legislative reform of the institution, the concern is that progressives will drop their demands for change, satisfied with a few modest judicial concessions. This Article aims to keep the discussion of court reform alive for more propitious circumstances and, just as importantly, to significantly expand its bounds. It does so, first, by urging progressives to reject the legitimacy frame of the issue, which treats the problem with the Supreme Court as one of politicization, in favor of an openly progressive frame in which the question is how to enable democracy within our constitutional scheme. Second, the Article introduces a distinction between two fundamentally different mechanisms of reform. The first type of reform, which we call personnel reforms, includes both aggressive proposals like court-packing and more modest (or politically moderate) reforms such as partisan balance requirements or panel systems. All of these reforms take for granted the tremendous power the Supreme Court wields. What these proposals do is change the partisan or ideological character of the individuals who wield it. The second type of reform, which we call disempowering reforms, includes proposals like jurisdiction stripping and a supermajority requirement for judicial review. These reforms take power away from the Court and redirect it to the political branches instead. As we argue, personnel reforms are mostly addressed to the legitimacy frame that progressives would do well to reject. More still, to the extent such reforms advance progressive ends, they do so only contingently and threaten to do as much harm as good over time. By contrast, disempowering reforms, we argue, advance progressive values systematically. While such reforms would not guarantee advances in social democracy, they would ensure that the battle for such advances takes place in the democratic arena. For progressives, this is where such reforms have to occur now—and should occur if they take place anywhere.

Rarely has a bipartisan commission been so fundamentally pointless.

Beyond packing schemes, we need to diminish the high court’s power.

The left discovers the problems with "juristocracy."

This Essay considers a popular, deceptively simple argument against the lawfulness of Chevron. As it explains, the argument appears to trade on an ambiguity in the term “ambiguity”—and does so in a way that reveals a mismatch between Chevron criticism and the larger jurisprudence of Chevron critics.

The goal shouldn’t be to make the Court less ideological, but to make it less powerful.

We can’t cede social change to well-meaning experts. Especially in an era of hostile courts, politics, not law, is the only way forward.

What statutory language means can vary from statute to statute, or even provision to provision. But what about from case to case? The conventional wisdom is that the same language can mean different things as used in different places within the United States Code. As used in some specific place, however, that language means what it means. Put differently, the same statutory provision must mean the same thing in all cases. To hold otherwise, courts and scholars suggest, would be contrary both to the rules of grammar and to the rule of law. This Article challenges that conventional wisdom. Building on the observation that speakers can and often do transparently communicate different things to different audiences with the same verbalization or written text, it argues that, as a purely linguistic matter, there is nothing to prevent Congress from doing the same with statutes. More still, because the practical advantages of using multiple meanings— in particular, linguistic economy—are at least as important to Congress as to ordinary speakers, this Article argues further that it would be just plain odd if Congress never chose to communicate multiple messages with the same statutory text. As this Article goes on to show, recognizing the possibility of multiple statutory meanings would let courts reach sensible answers to important doctrinal questions they currently do their best to avoid. Most notably, thinking about multiple meanings in an informed way would help courts explain under what conditions more than one agency should receive deference when interpreting a multi-agency statute. Relatedly, it would let courts reject as false the choice between Chevron deference and the rule of lenity for statutes with both civil and criminal applications.

Judges sometimes disagree about the best way to resolve a case. But the conventional wisdom is that they should not be too swayed by such disagreement and should do their best to decide the case by their own lights. An emerging critique questions this view, arguing instead for widespread humility. In the face of disagreement, the argument goes, judges should generally concede ambiguity and uncertainty in almost all contested cases. Both positions are wrong. Drawing on the philosophical concepts of “peer disagreement” and “epistemic peerhood,” we argue for a different approach: A judge ought to give significant weight to the views of others, but only when those others share the judge’s basic methodology or interpretive outlook—i.e., only when those others are methodological “friends.” Thus textualists should hesitate before disagreeing with other textualists, and pragmatists should hesitate before disagreeing with like-minded pragmatists. Disagreement between the two camps is, by contrast, “old news” and so provides neither camp additional reason for pause. We also suggest that judges should give weight to the views of all of their methodological friends, not just judges. And we suggest, even more tentatively, that our proposal may explain and, to some extent, justify the seemingly ideological clusters of justices on the Supreme Court. The most productive disagreements, we think, are ones that come from arguing with friends.

Courts look at text differently in high-stakes cases. Statutory language that would otherwise be “unambiguous” suddenly becomes “less than clear.” This, in turn, frees up courts to sidestep constitutional conflicts, avoid dramatic policy changes, and, more generally, get around undesirable outcomes. The standard account of this behavior is that courts’ failure to recognize “clear” or “unambiguous” meanings in such cases is motivated or disingenuous, and, at best, justified on instrumentalist grounds. This Article challenges that account. It argues instead that, as a purely epistemic matter, it is more difficult to “know” what a text means—and, hence, more difficult to regard that text as “clear” or “unambiguous”—when the practical stakes are raised. For that reason, this Article insists, it is entirely rational for courts to be more cautious when interpreting text in high-stakes cases than they would be if the stakes were low. Drawing on contemporary work in philosophy of language and epistemology, this Article grounds its argument in the observation that ordinary speakers’ willingness to attribute “knowledge” or “clarity” decreases as the practical stakes increase. And while the technical explanations of this phenomenon vary, they all reflect a basic insight: that one needs greater epistemic justification to act on some premise the higher the practical stakes. To illustrate, this Article applies the above insight to various interpretive settings. Considering judicial review, for example, this Article explains that it makes good epistemic sense for a court to wait until it is really sure that a statute means what it thinks it means before taking the extraordinary step of invalidating that statute as unconstitutional. Similarly, this Article urges that it is just sound epistemic practice for a court is to construe a statute in a way that would unsettle an existing implementation regime only if it is especially well justified in its reading of the statutory text—that is, only if it really knows that its reading is correct. This Article thus offers at least a partial justification of courts’ seemingly loose treatment of statutory text when the practical stakes are raised. And it does so, in contrast to prior scholarly efforts, by appeal to reasons that both formalists and instrumentalists can accept.

Legislative intent is a fiction. Courts and scholars accept this, by and large. As this Article shows, however, both are confused as to why legislative intent is a fiction and as to what this fiction entails. This Article first argues that the standard explanation—that Congress is a “they,” not an “it”—rests on an unduly simple conception of shared agency. Drawing from contemporary scholarship in the philosophy of action, it contends that Congress has no collective intention, not because of difficulties in aggregating the intentions of individual members, but rather because Congress lacks the sort of delegatory structure that one finds in, for example, a corporation. Second, this Article argues that—contrary to a recent, influential wave of scholarship—the fictional nature of legislative intent leaves interpreters of legislation with little reason to care about the fine details of legislative process. It is a platitude that legislative text must be interpreted in “context.” Context, however, consists of information salient to author and audience alike. This basic insight from the philosophy of language necessitates what this Article calls the “conversation” model of interpretation. Legislation is written by legislators for those tasked with administering the law—for example, courts and agencies—and those on whom the law operates—for example, citizens. Almost any interpreter thus occupies the position of conversational participant, reading legislative text in a context consisting of information salient both to members of Congress and to citizens (as well as agencies, courts, etc.). The conversation model displaces what this Article calls the “eavesdropping” model of interpretation—the prevailing paradigm among both courts and scholars. When asking what sources of information an interpreter should consider, courts and scholars have reliably privileged the epistemic position of members of Congress. The result is that legislation is erroneously treated as having been written by legislators exclusively for other legislators. This tendency is plainest in recent scholarship urging greater attention to legislative process—the nuances of which are of high salience to legislators but plainly not to citizens.

When should a court interpreting some statutory provision consider information besides the text—legislative history, surrounding provisions, practical consequences, the statute’s title, etc.? This might be one of the most asked questions of statutory interpretation. One recurring answer in the Court’s cases is the “plain meaning rule,” which is something of a compromise. If the statute’s meaning is “plain,” the other information can’t be considered. If it isn’t plain, the information comes in. The rule seems to make obvious sense as an intermediate position between strict textualism and some form of pragmatism. And yet, once we think a little more deeply about the plain meaning rule, we ought to see that its basic structure is puzzling. Information that is relevant shouldn’t normally become irrelevant just because the text is clear. And vice versa: irrelevant information shouldn’t become useful just because the text is less than clear. We can sketch some conditions under which this puzzling structure could be justified, but we highly doubt that they could justify the plain meaning rule in its current form.

It is widely accepted that courts may correct legislative drafting mistakes, i.e., so-called scrivener’s errors, if and only if such mistakes are “absolutely clear.” The rationale is that if a court were to recognize a less clear error, it might be “rewriting” the statute rather than correcting a technical mistake. This Article argues that the standard is much too strict. The current rationale ignores that courts can “rewrite,” i.e., misinterpret, a statute both by recognizing an error and by failing to do so. Accordingly, because the current doctrine is designed to protect against one type of mistake (false positives) but not the other (false negatives), it systematically underrecognizes errors and results in systematic misinterpretation of the law. Using the example of King v. Burwell, this Article shows that the overly strict scrivener’s error doctrine threatens dramatic real-world harm. In King, opponents of the Affordable Care Act exploited a likely, but less than absolutely clear, scrivener’s error to nearly bring down the most significant health reform legislation of the past half century. More still, the challenge only failed because six Justices were willing to accept an implausible textual argument. Furthermore, King is far from sui generis. Recent challenges to ambitious executive branch action, for example, try to take similar advantage of the current doctrine.

In National Cable & Telecommunications Ass'n v. Brand X Internet Services, the Supreme Court explained that, within the domain of unclear agency-administered statutes, a federal court is subordinate to an administering agency. When an administering agency speaks authoritatively, federal court practice reflects this. When an agency speaks only informally, however, federal court practice does not. Specifically, when construing an agency-administered statute absent an authoritative agency interpretation, a federal court errs, given its subordinate status, when it exercises independent judgment concerning what interpretation is best. Instead, that subordinate status requires a court to predict what authoritative interpretation the administering agency would adopt--just as a federal court would predict how a state's highest court would answer some unsettled question of state law. Adhering to this predictive approach requires in turn that a court assign significant--in most cases dispositive--evidentiary weight to agency interpretations contained within certain legal nonbinding instruments, in particular legal briefs. This is because the non-authoritative interpretations contained in such instruments will most often constitute the best available evidence concerning what an administering agency would say if it were to speak authoritatively. This conclusion is surprising given the central holding of United States v. Mead Corp. that interpretations contained in nonbinding instruments are not entitlted to controlling deference under Chevron U.S.A. Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. What this article will suggest is that the central holding of Mead ought to be mostly moot since, even where controlling deference is not owed de jure, it is most often owed de facto.

In Noel Canning v. NLRB, the D.C. Circuit held that the recess appointment power, which permits the President to "fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate," extends only to vacancies that arise during the recess between official sessions of the Senate. This Article advances two principal theses. The first is that the restrictions on the recess appointment power articulated in Noel Canning are compelled by the constitutional text. The second is that those restrictions are the only restrictions that the judiciary is in a position to enforce vis-à-vis the President's appointments. As to the first thesis, this Article argues that, because of the cursory nature of the linguistic analysis up to this point, most parties to the debate have become convinced (or perhaps better, have managed to convince themselves) that the text of the Recess Appointment Clause is ambiguous. It is not. First, the debate up until now has proceeded on the assumption that the term "happen" admits of two senses, such that something could be said to "happen" either when it arises or whenever it exists. This Article argues that one can make sense of the relevant linguistic data by attributing to "happen" a single sense, according to which something can be said to "happen" only during the entire period of time during which it exists. Second, critics of Noel Canning have argued that "the recess" as used in the Recess Appointments Clause is ambiguous insofar as it might refer either to some specific recess or to recesses as a kind. This Article suggests that, while it is possible to achieve kind-reference with a definite singular noun phrase, the preconditions for doing so are not met in the context of Article II, Section 2, Clause 3. As to the second thesis, this Article argues that the less sweeping objection levied against the President's appointments, that the period of adjournment during which they were issued was simply too brief to constitute a "recess," is difficult for a challenger to advance without contradiction, let alone for a court to accept and enforce.

In this article, I argue that sensibility-invariantism about ‘funny’ is defensible, not just as a descriptive hypothesis, but, as a normative position as well. What I aim to do is to make the realist commitments of the sensibility-invariantist out to be much more tenable than one might initially think them to be. I do so by addressing the two major sources of discontent with sensibility-invariantism: the observation that discourse about comedy exhibits significant divergence in judgment, and the fact that disagreements about comedy, unlike disagreements about, say, geography, often strike us as fundamentally intractable.