Statutory Default Rules: How to Interpret Unclear Legislation

✍ Scribed by Einer Elhauge

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2009
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 396
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Most 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.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Overview
CHAPTER 2 Why Courts Should Maximize Enactable Preferences When Statutes Are Unclear
PART I Current Preferences Default Rules
CHAPTER 3 The General Theory for Current Preferences Default Rules
CHAPTER 4 Inferring Current Preferences from Recent Legislative Action
CHAPTER 5 Inferring Current Preferences from Agency Action
PART II Enactor Preferences Default Rules
CHAPTER 6 From Legislative Intent to Probabilistic Estimates of Enactable Preferences
CHAPTER 7 Moderation, Unforseen Circumstances, and a Theory of Meaning
PART III Preference-Eliciting Default Rules
CHAPTER 8 Eliciting Legislative Preferences
CHAPTER 9 Canons Favoring the Politically Powerless
CHAPTER 10 Linguistic Canons of Statutory Construction
CHAPTER 11 Interpretations That May Create International Conflict
CHAPTER 12 Explaining Seeming Inconsistencies in Statutory Stare Decisis
PART IV Supplemental Default Rules
CHAPTER 13 Tracking the Preferences of Political Subunits
CHAPTER 14 Tracking High Court Preferences
PART V Objections
CHAPTER 15 The Fit with Prior Political Science Models and Empirical Data
CHAPTER 16 Interest Group and Collective Choice Theory
CHAPTER 17 Protecting Reliance or Avoiding Change or Effect
CHAPTER 18 Rebutting Operational and Jurisprudential Objections
Notes
Index