Rebecca Guthrie has posted this student note for the Fordham Law Review. I’m obviously interested in this topic, and its new database of cases alone will make this article very useful—but I expect if offers far more. I can’t wait to dive in. Here is the abstract:

Entire elections can be determined by the way a state judge chooses to interpret an election statute. And yet, there has been little scholarly attention on how judges construe statutes regulating elections at the state level. This Note begins to redress that lack of attention by undertaking an in-depth analysis of one interpretive tool historically invoked by state courts. The “Democracy Canon” is a substantive canon urging courts to liberally construe election statutes in favor of voter enfranchisement. By conducting a review of both historical and modern references to the Democracy Canon by state courts, this Note argues that courts have become less willing to rely on the Democracy Canon in recent decades. At the same time, codification of the Democracy Canon, and perhaps other substantive canons, by state legislatures may alleviate most concerns of courts about using substantive canons and may be the solution to revitalize the Democracy Canon.

The following is a guest post from Josh Blackman:

In Virginia, the Governor, Lieutenant Governor, and Attorney General are all being called upon to resign. If the Governor resigns, Article V, Section 16 of the Virginia Constitution provides a fairly clear order of succession: 

In the case of the removal of the Governor from office or in the case of his disqualification, death, or resignation, the Lieutenant Governor shall become Governor. If a vacancy exists in the office of Lieutenant Governor when the Lieutenant Governor is to succeed to the office of Governor or to serve as Acting Governor, the Attorney General, if he is eligible to serve as Governor, shall succeed to the office of Governor for the unexpired term or serve as Acting Governor. If the Attorney General is ineligible to serve as Governor, the Speaker of the House of Delegates, if he is eligible to serve as Governor, shall succeed to the office of Governor for the unexpired term or serve as Acting Governor. If a vacancy exists in the office of the Speaker of the House of Delegates or if the Speaker of the House of Delegates is ineligible to serve as Governor, the House of Delegates shall convene and fill the vacancy.

However, the Virginia Constitution does not explain what happens if the Lieutenant Governor resigns. The Virginia Attorney General recognized this gap in a 1982 opinion:

There is no provision in the Constitution of Virginia (1971) which expressly deals with filling a vacancy solely in the office of Lieutenant Governor. Article V, § 16 acknowledges the possibility of such a vacancy by providing that the Attorney General shall succeed to the office of Governor if a vacancy exists in the office of Lieutenant Governor when the Lieutenant Governor is to succeed to the office of Governor. Neither is there a statute which expressly deals with filling vacancies in the office of Lieutenant Governor.

What, then, happens if the Lieutenant Governor resigns? In the immediate aftermath of the vacancy, Section 24.2-212 would kick in. It provides:

“When a vacancy occurs in the office of Lieutenant Governor, the duties of that office shall be discharged by the President pro tempore of the Senate, but he shall not by reason thereof be deprived of his right to act and vote as a member of the Senate.”

However, the Attorney General concluded that the President pro tempore would only serve until the Governor made a unilateral appointment pursuant to Article V, Section 7. It provides:

“The Governor shall have power to fill vacancies in all offices of the Commonwealth for the filling of which the Constitution and laws make no other provision.”

The Attorney General concluded that:

“neither the Constitution nor § 24.1-84 [currently codified at 24.2-212] provides a method for filling a vacancy in the office of Lieutenant Governor. Consequently, I conclude that the Governor is empowered to fill such a vacancy under Art. V, § 7 and § 2.1-18.”

In other words, the Governor has the unilateral power to appoint the Lieutenant Governor—that is his successor.  And that person would serve until the next election.

There is another reading. The Virginia appointments clause gives the Governor plenary appointment powers  “for which the Constitution and laws make no other provision.” Would Section 24.2-212 be such a law that “makes other provisions”? In other words, Section 24.2-212 would create a special carve-out to the Governor’s general unilateral power.

As a structural matter, this alternate reading makes sense. Consider the 25th Amendment as an analogy. It provides:  “Whenever there is a vacancy in the office of the Vice President, the President shall nominate a Vice President who shall take office upon confirmation by a majority vote of both Houses of Congress.” After the resignation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, President Nixon was only able to select then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford as his VP with the consent of Congress. It would have been untenable for Nixon to select a crony who would replace him following resignation. This situation somewhat resembles the crisis in Virginia, where the Governor is also under calls to resign.

If the Lieutenant Governor resigns, and the Governor makes an appointment, the President Pro Tempore would have standing to challenge his displacement from office.

Amy Semet has posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract:

ow do administrative agencies interpret statutes? Despite the theoretical treatment scholars offer on how agencies construe statutes, far less is known empirically about administrative statutory interpretation even though agencies play a critical role in interpreting statutes. This Article looks behind the black box of agency statutory interpretation to review how administrative agencies use canons and other tools of statutory interpretation to decide cases. Surveying over 7,000 cases heard by the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) from 1993-2016, I analyze the statutory methodologies the Board uses in its decisions in order to uncover patterns of how the Board interprets statutes over time. Overall, I find no ideological coherence to statutory methodology. Board members switch between textualist or purposive methods depending upon the partisan outcome sought. Indeed, Board members often use statutory methodologies to dueling purposes, with majority and dissenting Board members using the same statutory methodology to support contrasting outcomes. The Board has also changed how it interprets statutes over time, relying in recent years more on vague pronouncements of policy and less on precedent or legislative history. Moreover, despite scholars arguing that agencies should interpret statutes differently than courts, in practice, this study indicates that the NLRB interprets its governing statute in similar fashion to how courts do. After analyzing the empirical data, I set forth policy recommendations for how agencies should interpret statutes. The balance required—between policy coherence, stability and democratic accountability—is fundamentally different in the context of agency statutory interpretation than for interpretation by a judicial body. Rather than acting like a court, adjudicative agencies like the NLRB should leverage their expertise to arrive at an interpretation that best effectuates the purpose of the statute. For an agency like the NLRB that makes decisions almost exclusively through adjudication this may necessitate that the agency reveal its statutory interpretation in a more transparent fashion through rulemaking.

I have written this oped for the National Law Journal. It begins:

The battle over Justice Antonin Scalia’s approach to interpreting federal statutes shows no signs of abating even two years after his death, as a pair of opinions issued Wednesday by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a concurring opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas and a surprising concurring vote of Justice Samuel Alito show.

Scalia’s most lasting influence on the Supreme Court is likely to be “textualism,” an approach to deciding the meaning of statutes by relying upon the words of the statutory text as a reader at the time of the statute’s enactment would have understood them. Scalia would frequently turn to dictionary or “canons” of construction (rules of thumb for deciding cases, such as interpreting criminal law statutes leniently to help defendants) as an aid to construction. What he would almost never do is consult legislative history (such as the statement of a senator on the floor of the Senate or a House of Representatives committee report accompanying legislation) to understand the statute’s meaning. He thought such legislative history was unreliable, manipulable and not the law passed by Congress….

Sotomayor took up the cause of anti-textualism Wednesday in a concurring opinion in Digital Realty Trust v. Somers, a case concerning a technical provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank anti-corporate fraud statute protecting whistleblowers. All nine justices on the high court agreed with the result reached by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s majority opinion on the meaning of the whistleblower provision. Ginsburg’s majority opinion relied not only on the words in the statute but also a Senate report explaining its meaning.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Neil Gorsuch, issued a separate opinion agreeing with the parts of Ginsburg’s opinion using the textualist approach, but rejected any reliance on the Senate report or legislative history. Thomas wrote, quoting in part Scalia, that “Even assuming a majority of Congress read the Senate Report, agreed with it, and voted for Dodd-Frank with the same intent, ‘we are a government of laws, not of men, and are governed by what Congress enacted rather than by what it intended.’”

Especially interesting was Alito’s agreement to sign on to the Thomas concurrence. While Gorsuch is a professed textualist, Alito has been willing to look at legislative history, which dismayed Scalia. Perhaps the passage of time has turned Alito into more of a textualist.

The short Thomas concurrence prompted a response from Sotomayor, who argued for the relevance of legislative history in understanding the meaning of a statute in context. She relied upon Second Circuit Chief Judge Robert Katzmann’s excellent rejoinder to Scalia, his 2014 book, “Judging Statutes,” as well as the work of professors Abbe Gluck and Lisa Schultz Bressman, showing that congressional staffers viewed committee reports as the most reliable type of legislative history. Sotomayor wrote that “legislative history can be particularly helpful when a statute is ambiguous or deals with especially complex matters. But even when, as here, a statute’s meaning can clearly be discerned from its text, consulting reliable legislative history can still be useful, as it enables us to corroborate and fortify our understanding of the text.”

Despite Sotomayor’s valiant defense of more holistic statutory interpretation, she did not mention a bit of legislative history in her unanimous opinion for the court Wednesday in Rubin v. Islamic Republic of Iran. Rubin concerned whether the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act of 1976 prevented a plaintiff, who held a judgment against Iran for assisting in terrorist act, from obtaining Iranian artifacts held at the University of Chicago to satisfy the judgment. The unanimous court held that the FSIA gave Iran immunity from this attempt to satisfy the judgment….

Despite the fact that all of the Supreme Court merits briefs in Rubin, as well as an amicus brief of the United States, cited the legislative history of the FSIA—including a floor statement of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ—Sotomayor’s opinion did not mention legislative history at all.