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84.2
Reconsidering Substantive Canons
Anita S. Krishnakumar
Professor of Law, St. John’s University School of Law

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.

There is a popular belief among statutory interpretation scholars that substantive canons of statutory construction—that is, policy-based background norms or presumptions such as the rule of lenity and the canon of constitutional avoidance—act as an “escape valve” that helps textualist judges eschew, or “mitigate,” the rigors of textualism.
Empirical Analysis Statutory Interpretation Substantive Canons
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84.2
Chevron Step One-and-a-Half
Daniel J. Hemel
Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

For helpful comments, the authors thank Nicholas Bagley, Aditya Bamzai, William Baude, Omri Ben-Shahar, Ryan Doerfler, Richard Epstein, Matthew Etchemendy, Lee Fennell, Margot Kaminski, Robin Kar, Genevieve Lakier, Ronald Levin, Jonathan Masur, Richard McAdams, Jennifer Nou, Michael Pollack, Eric Posner, Richard Posner, John Rappaport, Peter Shane, Paul Stancil, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, David Strauss, Lisa Grow Sun, Christopher Walker, and the participants at workshops at The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, the J. Reuben Clark Law School, and The University of Chicago Law School. An Online Appendix detailing Chevron Step One-and-a-Half cases is available on The University of Chicago Law Review’s website. All errors are strategic.

Aaron L. Nielson
Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University

The Supreme Court’s decision in Chevron U.S.A. Inc v Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc has created a cottage industry in choreography.

Administrative Law Chevron Statutory Interpretation
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Article
84.2
Due Process, Fair Play, and Excessive Partisanship: A New Principle for Judicial Review of Election Laws
Edward B. Foley
Charles W. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold Chair in Constitutional Law and Director, Election Law @ Moritz, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law

This Article, part of a larger project on the concept of fair play in electoral competition, grows out of research conducted during a fellowship at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). I am extremely grateful, both for the fellowship itself and for the many helpful exchanges of ideas during the fellowship, to Bruce E. Cain, Larry Diamond, Francis Fukuyama, Nathaniel Persily, and Stephen J. Stedman. While at Stanford, I had the opportunity to present an early version of this Article at the Stanford Law Review’s symposium on the “Law of Democracy” (February 5, 2016), and also as part of a CDDRL workshop (February 25, 2016). I also presented a version at the University of Kentucky College of Law (April 1, 2016). I very much appreciate the feedback I have received from those who participated at these events, including Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Stephen Ansolabehere, Rabia Belt, Guy-Uriel Charles, Joshua A. Douglas, Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, Heather Gerken, Richard L. Hasen, Samuel Issacharoff, Michael S. Kang, Eugene Mazo, Michael W. McConnell, Maggie McKinley, Spencer A. Overton, Richard H. Pildes, Bertrall Ross, Jane S. Schacter, Nicholas Stephanopoulos, and Justin Weinstein-Tull. As always, I’ve benefited immensely from feedback received from my Moritz colleagues, especially Steven F. Huefner and Christopher J. Walker, as well as Michael Les Benedict, Lisa Marshall Manheim, and Evan Zoldan. I have also been tremendously fortunate to work with Matt Cooper and Paul Gatz, two of Moritz’s superb law librarians, who have been amazingly creative and effective in unearthing a wide range of sources for this project.

Can the US Constitution, as currently written, handle the problem of excessive partisanship? Or, instead, does the Constitution need to be amended to address this problem?

Due Process Election Law Gerrymandering
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84.2
Before Interpretation
Anya Bernstein
Associate Professor, SUNY Buffalo School of Law. JD, Yale Law School; PhD (Anthropology), The University of Chicago

I have benefited from the incisive commentary of Todd Aagaard, Christine Bartholomew, Barton Beebe, Guyora Binder, Michael Boucai, Michael Coenen, Nicholas Day, David Engel, Richard Fallon, James Gardner, Jessica Greenberg, Jerry Mashaw, Hiroshi Motomura, Anthony O’Rourke, Nicholas Parrillo, Justin Richland, Cristina Rodríguez, Glen Staszewski, and Tico Taussig-Rubbo, as well as presentation participants at SUNY Buffalo School of Law, the Academia Sinica Institutum Iurisprudentiae, and the 2016 Law and Society Association conference.

Interpretation requires an object: a text, an act, a concept, a something to be interpreted. An interpreter must pick out that object.

Judicial Decision-Making Statutory Interpretation Textualism
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84.2
The (Not So) Plain Meaning Rule
William Baude
Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Law, The University of Chicago Law School

We appreciate helpful comments and criticisms from Larry Alexander, Samuel Bray, Eric Citron, Jonah Gelbach, Abbe Gluck, Richard McAdams, Sean Mirski, Eric Posner, Richard Re, Stephen Sachs, Adam Samaha, Frederick Schauer, Asher Steinberg, James Stern, David Strauss, Ilan Wurman, the participants in the Legislation Roundtable at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review. We also appreciate research support from the SNR Denton Fund and the Alumni Faculty Fund, and excellent research assistance from Kelly Holt.

Ryan D. Doerfler
Assistant Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School

Many tenets of statutory interpretation take a peculiar form. They allow consideration of outside information—legislative history, practical consequences, the statute’s title, etc.—but only if the statute’s text is unclear or ambiguous.

Judicial Decision-Making Statutory Interpretation Textualism
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84.1
The Numerus Clausus of Sex
Sonia K. Katyal
Chancellor’s Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law

The author wishes to thank the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law; Boston University; the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law; Rutgers Law School; Fordham University School of Law; Seton Hall University School of Law; Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University; the University of Washington School of Law; and the University of Miami Law School for helpful conversation. I am especially indebted to Kathryn Abrams, Kenny Alston, Sergio Campos, Mary Anne Case, Paisley Currah, Katie Eyer, Sheila Foster, Katherine Franke, Mary Anne Franks, Andrew Gilden, Zil Goldstein, Gayatri Gopinath, Joanna Grossman, Bruce Hay, Tracy Higgins, Clare Huntington, Molly Van Houweling, Neal Katyal, Alexander Lee, Linda McClain, Melissa Murray, Russell Robinson, Juana Maria Rodriguez, Darren Rosenblum, Simone Ross, Dean Spade, Edward Stein, Leti Volpp, and the editors of The University of Chicago Law Review for their insights and suggestions. I am also particularly grateful for the incredible research assistance of Juli Adhikari, Joseph Galvin, Andrea Hall, Kelly Herbert, Nicole Rivera, and Catherine Song.

I.  Sex as Scarcity

Civil Rights Gender Studies Intellectual Property Property Law
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84.1
Corporate Governance Regulation through Nonprosecution
Jennifer Arlen
Norma Z. Paige Professor of Law at New York University School of Law
Marcel Kahan
George T. Lowy Professor of Law at New York University School of Law

We benefited from helpful comments from David Abrams, Cindy Alexander, Miriam Baer, Rachel Barkow, Jayne Barnard, Michal Barzuza, Lisa Bernstein, Samuel Buell, Oscar Couwenberg, Brandon Garrett, William Hubbard, Edward Iacobucci, Louis Kaplow,
Michael Klausner, Brett McDonnell, Mark Ramseyer, Eva Schliephake, Steven Shavell, Matthew Spitzer, Abraham Wickelgren, Josephine van Zeben, and participants at the annual meetings of the Business Associations Section of the Association of American Law Schools, the American Law and Economics Association, the European Law and Economics Association, and the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics, as well as participants at workshops at Brooklyn Law School; UCLA School of Law; Columbia Law School; ETH Zurich; Harvard Law School; NYU School of Law; University of Pennsylvania Law School; University of Pompeu Fabra; Queen’s Law School, Ontario, Canada; Stanford Law School; University of Texas Law School; University of Toronto Faculty of Law; University of Virginia School of Law; and Western Law School, Ontario, Canada. We also would like to thank Brandon Garrett and Vic Khanna for sharing their data on PDAs, which we compared to our own hand-collected dataset. We also thank Brandon Arnold, Rachel Lu Chen, Elias Debbas, Josh Levy, Reagan Lynch, Matt Mutino, Alice Phillips, Jared Roscoe, KyungEun Kimberly Won, and Donna Xu for excellent research assistance, with special thanks to Tristan Favro, Katya Roze, and Cristina Vasile. Jennifer Arlen is grateful for the financial support of the New York University School of Law. Marcel Kahan’s research was supported by the Milton and Miriam Handler Foundation.

I.  Corporate Criminal Enforcement and PDAs

Business Organizations Corporate Governance Criminal Law
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Essay
84.1
The Unbearable Rightness of Auer
Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard University
Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler Jr Professor of Constitutional Law, Harvard Law School

We are grateful to Ron Levin, John Manning, Arden Rowell, David Strauss, participants at a Harvard Law School faculty workshop, and participants at a University of Chicago symposium for valuable comments, and to Evelyn Blacklock and Maile Yeats-Rowe for superb research assistance. Parts of this Essay significantly expand and revise, while drawing on, a section of a near-contemporaneous, and much longer, article, Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, The New Coke: On the Plural Aims of Administrative Law, 2015 S Ct Rev 41. We are grateful for permission to draw on that section here.

I.  Cases and Problems

Administrative Law Best Practices Chevron Regulation Statutory Interpretation
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Essay
84.1
Originalist Methodology
Lawrence B. Solum
Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

I owe thanks to the participants in The University of Chicago Law Review Symposium on “Developing Best Practices for Legal Analysis,” which led to the Symposium Issue in which this Essay appears, and to participants at a faculty workshop at Georgetown University Law Center. I owe special thanks to Gregory Klass and Louis Michael Seidman for the their very helpful suggestions and criticisms. My thanks as well to Johanna Schmidt for valuable research assistance. © 2017 by Lawrence B. Solum.

I.  The Theoretical Framework

The development of an originalist methodology requires a theoretical framework, the elaboration of which can begin with the idea of meaning itself.

A.    The Meaning of “Meaning”

Best Practices Linguistics Originalism Statutory Interpretation