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Should Judges Justify Recourse to Broader Contexts When Interpreting Statutes?

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Abstract

Courts purport to abandon ordinary meaning only when words in a statute accommodate more than one meaning; to look to surrounding words, legislative history, and then public policy considerations, only if those previous efforts fail. The canon of statutory construction, “a word is known by its associates,” generally means nearest associates, or near as possible. An analogous language philosophy principle counsels increasing search radius only as needed. Dimensional extension advances the sequence to broader domains of information. Such incrementalist restrictions should require consistent justification of each broadening step by the inadequacy of preceding steps. But courts don’t do this, and shouldn’t. This essay references the legal debate between “textualists” and non-textualists and its philosophical parallel between minimalists and pragmatists. It illustrates court departures from the incrementalist model, and concludes that when judges choose broad evidentiary contexts in seeking statutory meaning, they need no more justification than when they choose narrower ones.

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Notes

  1. Similarly, in anaphora resolution, the prevalent theory holds that “Checking stops when the smallest domain fulfilling [some] requirement is found” [11: 52]. Note that canons of statutory interpretation often have analogues in Grice’s conversational maxims [48].

  2. See, for example, the “common core” of types of arguments offered in support of particular interpretations of statutes in Argentina, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States, from “ordinary meaning” to “contextual harmonization” to legislative intent [54: 464–465].

  3. Carston excepts thoughts not expressed in language [7: 340], not relevant to the present discussion.

  4. Weakly-supported maximalism is by no means limited to the federal courts. See for example State v. Courchesne [53], where the Connecticut Supreme Court explicitly rejected plain meaning, or minimalism [53: 586]; rejected application of the rule of lenity, a canon of interpretation for criminal penalty statutes [53: 555]; and essentially ignored the dissent’s argument that the legislature could have had sound reasons for writing the statute just as it had [53: 617].

  5. Debate in committee, perhaps in mark-up session, more often shapes legislation than floor debate [see, e.g., 10].

  6. Processes that draw on the cognitive environment for additional meaning [51: 257].

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Acknowledgements

Professor Stephen Neale of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York provided immensely valuable guidance for this manuscript.

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    Daniel L. Feldman

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Feldman, D.L. Should Judges Justify Recourse to Broader Contexts When Interpreting Statutes?. Int J Semiot Law 34, 377–388 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-020-09696-8

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