Legislation
Class Notes
Interpretation in light of
other statutes
Why
should we bother to look at other statutes?
We want to make law consistent with respect to our choice of language. Why would an imaginative reconstruction judge
like Posner be unhappy about looking at other statutes? What does an imaginative reconstructionist
think about? What makes someone
skeptical about borrowing from another statute?
If you start borrowing from another statute, you run the risk that you’ll
graft onto the deal something the dealmakers weren’t thinking about. The more you think about a statute as a sui generis deal, the more you run the
risk of undercutting the deal. If you
don’t uphold these deals, the deals might not get made, and that may not be desirable.
Textualists
like the linguistic context approach of invoking similar statutes. Scalia talked a lot about other statues in Casey v. West Virginia. People who agree with dynamic interpretation
may approve in the sense that statutes build upon one another. We can find a policy that develops from a
succession of similar statutes building in a certain direction. Casey
is an example of a case where Scalia believes they knew how to say “experts”,
so if they don’t use that word, it
means something.
We
have a trio of unusual cases.
Cartledge v.
Miller
The
plaintiffs are pension plan committee members.
They seek a federal injunction against Cozart for assigning his benefits
to his former spouse. The named defendant
in the case is the judge who issued the order to assign the benefits. The judge here holds that ERISA does not
preclude a court from enforcing family support rights. Is this a super-strong clear statement rule
that nobody knew existed before? This is
a pretty strong presumption that he’s positing.
This judge puts a lot of weight on a DC Circuit case.
Lorillard v.
Pons
Does
the ADEA give the right to a jury trial?
The FLSA provided the right to a jury trial. We have jury trial rights under Title
VII. Sometimes there’s a reason the
original deal looks a little different because of what people are worried
about. Congress was careful to draw not from Title VII in procedural
terms. There are reasons to think they
did it, and reasons to think that they didn’t do it. It might have been perfectly sensible to
avoid copying Title VII in just one respect.
“Legal relief” is, historically, a Seventh Amendment term. That’s where you get a right to a jury trial
for damages. Equitable relief has been,
historically, judge-given. The equitable
relief under Title VII does not entitle you to a jury trial.
Morton v.
Mancari
Subsequent
statutes can be a way for guidance to earlier statutes. But it’s not always the case. Here we have an Indian Reorganization
Act. Plaintiffs who are not Indian
changes the hiring preferences as being against the Civil Rights Act. We’re looking at Title VII as an integrated statutory
scheme. Why should we assume that they
meant to do it in 1972 when they didn’t do it in 1972? That’s a pretty robust argument. It may not prevail, but it’s certainly not
trivial. The Court wonders why Congress
would have given preferences in teacher training programs for Indian children
if they haven’t already recognized that these preferences are permissible with respect
to government programs.