Statutory Interpretation

I am grateful to participants in workshops at the Harvard, University of Virginia, University of Michigan, and University of Chicago Law Schools, and to Mary Anne Case, Barry Cushman, Elizabeth Emens, Richard Fallon, Barry Friedman, Don Herzog, Christine Jolls, Michael Klarman, Jacob Levy, Eric Posner, Richard Primus, Adam Samaha, Kirsten Smolensky, Geoffrey Stone, Cass Sunstein, John Sylla, and Adrian Vermeule for comments on earlier versions of this Article. I also thank Mark Sherman and Karen Courtheoux for excellent research assistance and the Sonnenschein Faculty Fund at The University of Chicago Law School for financial support.

Thanks to John Gardner, Leslie Green, Mark Greenberg, and Scott Shapiro for useful discussion of these issues on various occasions, and to Greenberg for quite helpful discussion of an early draft of this Article. I also benefited from questions and comments by students in my Spring 2007 Jurisprudence class at the University of Texas at Austin when we discussed this topic. Workshop audiences at a variety of venues provided valuable feedback and discussion: the Faculty of Law and Program in Social and Political Theory, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University; UCLA School of Law; the Institute for Philosophical Investigation, National Autonomous University of Mexico; the jurisprudence departments of the Faculties of Law at the Universities of Genoa in Italy and Girona in Spain, and the University of Chicago Law School. Of the many who helped me on these occasions, I should mention especially Peter Cane, Riccardo Guastini, Larry Laudan, Adam Muchmore, Martha Nussbaum, Giovanni Ratti, Jane Stapleton, and Ed Stein.

We thank Jim Brudney, Annie Decker, Jeffrey Dobbins, Amanda Frost, Abbe Gluck, Helen Hershkoff, the Honorable Hans Linde (retired Justice of the Oregon Supreme Court), Jeffrey Pojanowski, David Pozen, and Mark Tushnet for incisive comments on earlier drafts; Michelle Anderson, Richard Schragger, Richard Briffault, Rick Hills, and Howie Erichson for conversations about aspects of this project; and Joseph Struble for research assistance. Portions of this Article were presented at the 2012 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, where the audience provided helpful feedback. Professor Leib also thanks the one hundred or so students in his Legislation classes at UC Berkeley and at UC Hastings who provided an answer on a final exam to the question of how, if at all, elected judges should interpret statutes differently from their federal counterparts.

My thanks to Gary Lawson, Larry Solum, and Sherif Girgis for comments on fragments of early drafts. (Do not blame them for what I say.)

Akhil Amar is an old and dear friend. We were roommates and constitutional law sparring partners as students at Yale Law School in the early 1980s. We disagreed wildly and occasionally vehemently—yet somehow still cheerfully—over many things. We continue to disagree over a great many things today—including (as this review demonstrates) nearly everything in his recent book. As noted below, I have reviewed two of Akhil’s other books highly favorably. See note 3. I hope he will forgive me this unfavorable— but still cheerful—review, which I offer in the same spirit as our dorm-room screaming matches thirty years ago. (You told me I could let you have it, if I thought you deserved it, Akhil. Well, here it is!)

I owe deep thanks for valuable insights and conversations to Aaron-Andrew Bruhl, William N. Eskridge, Abbe R. Gluck, Rebecca M. Kysar, Margaret H. Lemos, Katherine Shaw, Lawrence Solan, Nelson Tebbe, and Adam Zimmerman. I am especially indebted to my husband, Ron Tucker, for his patience with this project. Special thanks to Dean Michael A. Simons and St. John’s University School of Law for generous research assistance and to participants at workshops and colloquia at Yale Law School and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law for their comments on earlier drafts of this Article. Christina Corcoran, Sade Forte, Ilya Mordukhaev, Jennifer Roseman, Samuel Sroka, Rita Wang, Kim Friedman, Lissa Yang, Peter Ryan, Vince Nibali, Christine Sammarco, and Thomas Combs provided terrific research assistance. Thanks also to the editors at The University of Chicago Law Review for their excellent work. All errors are my own.