Anita Krishnakumar has written this article for the George Washington Law Review.  Here is the abstract: Many of the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation cases infer meaning from Congress’s failure to comment in the legislative record. Colorfully referred to as the… Continue reading

Anita Krishnakumar has posted this draft on SSRN.  Here is the abstract: This paper provides the first empirical study of the Roberts Court’s use of substantive canons in its statutory interpretation cases. Based on data from 295 statutory interpretation cases… Continue reading

Back in September I flagged a forthcoming article by Richard Re, in The Green Bag. The piece is now out, and it is brilliant. This is one of those things that you read and you say, “Damn, why didn’t… Continue reading

Insightful post from Richard Re.

Report and video (via How Appealing).

Harvard Law Review Forum: Pofessor Abbe Gluck is far more steeped in the scholarly literature on statutory interpretation than I, and far more familiar with the workings of Congress than I, including the specific legislative process that generated the… Continue reading

Jim Brudney and Larry Baum have posted this draft on SSRN (Yale L.J. Forum).  Here is the abstract: The remarkable rise in dictionary usage by the Supreme Court since the mid-1980s has been a subject of considerable scholarly and media… Continue reading

Law in Linguistics: Karl Llewellyn, a prominent mid-20th century legal scholar, famously said that “there are two opposing canons on almost every point.” On November 3, the Supreme Court will hear argument in Lockhart v. United States, a… Continue reading