Legislation
Class Notes
These notes won’t be quite
complete because I have to leave a little early today.
More on Holy Trinity
Some
of the exemptions are for people who seem to be “mental laborers”. So why would you need an exemption for some “brain toilers” if you didn’t
intend that the statute would apply to any such people? This seems to suggest that Congress had a
bigger picture of labor than mere manual
labor.
How
might we use imaginative reconstructive to address the issue of whether pastors
are covered or not? What were they
trying to do in passing this act?
If
we were trying to decide whether to allow foreign pastors into this country,
what would the legislature and interested parties have said? Far from wanting to keep pastors out, we
probably would have wanted them to bring them in. We wanted to convert Catholics to
Protestants.
When
we imaginatively reconstruct a statute, we think about what both the members of
the legislature and the interest groups (or interested
groups) would have thought.
Brewer
believes that the
One
lesson about the disagreement about Congress’s focus on the immigration act we
were talking about before is that you can’t attribute omniscience to Congress.
There’s
this statute that authorizes the recovery of double damages for each day a
seaman is not paid his wages.
The
Supreme Court finds that the statute allows no judicial discretion and forces
the court to award a lot of money to
The
words “shall pay” are important. These
are construed as different from “may pay” or “should pay” or “will pay”. “Shall” is a mandatory word, absent some qualifier elsewhere in the provision.
There
is a concern that the plain language might conflict with purpose. The respondent believes this act is primarily
compensatory. If that’s so, then if we
give $300,000 for a $400 back pay claim, that ain’t
compensatory. Therefore, it is argued, a
literal approach will fly in the face of the claimed purpose of the statute.
Rehnquist
disagrees. He believes that Congress has
chosen to secure their compensatory purpose through arguably punitive means.
What
is Rehnquist arguing? Is he arguing that
plain meaning should be used because when it is clear on its face it trumps
everything else in the “funnel”? Or
should plain meaning be used because it furthers the “purpose” of the act? Does Rehnquist use a “softer” form of plain
meaning? Does he suggest that something could trump plain meaning, but it just
doesn’t here? Scalia, Easterbrook, and
others will take a harder-edged view of the plain meaning rule. Rehnquist has cited to legislative history and
is prepared to say that sometimes plain meaning can be trumped by other stuff.
What
about the legislative history of this act?
Is this the same kind of legislative history that we were looking at in Holy Trinity? No.
What Rehnquist is calling legislative history is the successive textual
changes to the act. It’s sort of “vertical”
legislative history. It’s what happened
to the text over time. He doesn’t look
at committee reports or floor debates.
We tend to look at “horizontal” legislative history: we look at comment
on a statute that is currently under consideration. That’s what Holy Trinity was about.
So
if you see courts talking about legislative history in jurisdictions were committee
reports and floor debates and such are not recorded, they are probably talking
about this sort of “vertical” legislative history.
There
is no qualifier on “two days’ pay” and no qualifier on the period. This is a change from previous versions. There is no “up to”.
Does
the Court think this is an absurd result?