Description
Book SynopsisMost new law is statutory law; that is, law enacted by legislators. An important question, therefore, is how should this law be interpreted by courts and agencies, especially when the text of a statute is not entirely clear. This book focuses on what judges should do once the legal materials fail to resolve the interpretive question.
Trade ReviewStatutory Default Rules is an important contribution to the debate over legal interpretation. It rehabilitates the imaginative-reconstruction approach of Learned Hand and gives it new intellectual foundations, including a sophisticated appreciation of relevant social science. -- Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School
An important contribution to the field, cogently written and well-organized, it will spark lively discussion in a domain of legal scholarship that could certainly use it. -- Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, Stanford Law School
The book is a masterpiece which I will be using in my own work (hopefully) for decades to come! -- Jonathan Macey, Yale Law School
Table of Contents1. Introduction and Overview 2. Why Courts Should Maximize Enactable Preferences when Statutes Are Unclear Part I. Current Preferences Default Rules 3. The General Theory for Current Preferences Default Rules 4. Inferring Current Preferences from Recent Legislative Action 5. Inferring Current Preferences from Agency Action Part II. Enactor Preferences Default Rules 6. From Legislative Intent to Probabilistic Estimates of Enactable Preferences 7. Moderation, Changed or Uncontemplated Circumstances, and a Theory of Meaning Part III. Preference-Eliciting Default Rules 8. Eliciting Legislative Preferences 9. Canons Favoring the Politically Powerless 10. Linguistic Canons of Statutory Construction 11. Interpretations that May Create International Conflict 12. Explaining Seeming Inconsistencies in Statutory Stare Decisis Part IV. Supplemental Default Rules 13. Tracking the Preferences of Political Subunits 14. Tracking High Court Preferences Part V. Objections 15. The Fit with Prior Political Science Models and Empirical Data 16. The Critiques of Politics by Interest Group Theory and Collective Choice Theory 17. Alternative Default Rules that Protect Reliance or Avoid Change or Effect 18. Rebutting Operational and Jurisprudential Objections Notes Index
