Statutory Interpretation

In this Comment, Zoë Lewis Ewing evaluates the implementation of the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act (DVSJA), a New York law passed in 2019 to provide shortened sentencing ranges for domestic violence survivors convicted of crimes. It identifies an inconsistency in sentencing courts’ application of the law’s causation standard, which requires that a petitioner’s experience of domestic violence be a “significant contributing factor” to their criminal conduct. Some courts interpret the prong narrowly, while others apply a broad causation standard. This Comment argues that courts should opt for the latter approach and consider causation in the DVSJA satisfied if domestic violence was “sufficiently significant to have likely helped bring about the criminal conduct.”

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it unlawful to deny people with disabilities “reasonable accommodations.” But courts have long split over how to interpret this provision. At the center of the divide is the statutory requirement that an accommodation be “necessary to afford . . . equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.” Some courts interpret this language to impose a strict-necessity standard, requiring that an accommodation be truly indispensable. Other circuits instead read the statute as imposing a lenient-necessity standard, requiring only that the requested accommodation ameliorate the plaintiff’s disability. Rather than pick one interpretation, this Comment suggests that courts should tailor the necessity standard they employ to the type of case that is brought. Analyzing the text of the statute, Ben Griswold argues that the term “use and enjoy” invokes common law property ideas that should inform the interpretation of the reasonable accommodation provision. This textual analysis indicates that courts should apply a lenient-necessity requirement to cases brought by housing occupants requesting a specific accommodation, but should apply a strict-necessity requirement in cases brought by developers seeking zoning variances. Further, this interpretation addresses important information asymmetries, enabling courts to more optimally select for societally beneficial accommodations.

We live in a republic of amended statutes. In each Congress, our laws are amended tens of thousands of times. Individual statutes make amendments that number in the thousands. As a result, the amended statute has become the central democratic text of our age—a remarkable development for a type of document unknown at the Founding. Yet the amended statute has been relegated to an afterthought in legal theory. This is incredible neglect for an essential source of modern law—one that anchors innumerable rights in U.S. society. In this Article, Jesse M. Cross demonstrates that, instead, the amended statute belongs at the center of public law. To that end, he undertakes three projects with respect to the amended statute: documenting, theorizing, and interpreting.