Legislation

Statutes and administrative regulations account for much of modern American law, and lawyers therefore need a sophisticated understanding of how courts interpret written laws. This course tries to take a systematic look at both the theory and the practice of statutory interpretation. Among other topics, we will consider (1) debates about the interplay between the text and the apparent purposes of a statute, (2) debates about the use of legislative history, (3) some of the canons of construction that lawyers and judges frequently invoke, (4) principles about how statutes interact with each other and with other forms of law, (5) the circumstances in which courts defer to administrative agencies in the interpretation of federal statutes, (6) the circumstances in which federal statutes preempt state law, and (7) the potential for the proper application or interpretation of statutes to change over time. The course will focus entirely on statutory interpretation; we will consider the legislative process only as it bears on interpretation of the resulting statutes.