Statutory Interpretation

I benefited greatly from conversations with Zak Rosenfield, Rosalind Dixon, and Julie Roin.

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.