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Barrett on Substantive Canons & Faithful Agency

By Lawrence Solum

Amy Coney Barrett (Notre Dame Law School) has posted Substantive Canons and Faithful Agency (Boston University Law Review, Vol. 90, 2010) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

Federal courts have long employed substantive canons of construction to interpret federal statutes. Some substantive canons express a rule of thumb for choosing between equally plausible interpretations of ambiguous text. The rule of lenity is often described this way: it directs that courts interpret ambiguous penal statutes in favor of the defendant. Other canons are more aggressive, permitting a court to forgo a statute?s most natural interpretation in favor of a less plausible one more protective of a particular value. For example, a court will strain the text of a statute to avoid deciding a serious constitutional question, and absent a clear statement, it will not interpret an otherwise unqualified statute to subject either the federal government or the states to suit. While courts and commentators sometimes seek to rationalize these and other substantive canons as proxies for congressional intent, it is generally recognized that substantive canons advance policies independent of those expressed in the statute.

The courts? adoption of more aggressive substantive canons poses no problem of authority for dynamic statutory interpreters, who conceive of courts as the cooperative partners of Congress and treat the protection of social values as part of the courts? task in statutory interpretation. It poses a significant problem of authority, however, for textualists, who understand courts to be the faithful agents of Congress. A court applying a canon to strain statutory text uses something other than the legislative will as its interpretive lodestar, and in so doing, it acts as something other than a faithful agent. The application of substantive canons, therefore, is at apparent odds with the central premise from which textualism proceeds. Textualists occasionally note this tension. Nonetheless, they continue to accept substantive canons, and no one has examined whether substantive canons can be reconciled with a theory of statutory interpretation animated by a strong commitment to legislative supremacy.

This Article seeks to answer that question. Part I describes faithful agency, substantive canons, and why the two are in tension. Part II contributes to the important historical debate about the principle of legislative supremacy with a systematic study of the way that eighteenth- and nineteenth- century federal courts applied substantive canons. Prior historical work has focused on the question whether early federal courts believed ?the judicial Power? to include a broad equitable authority to alter statutory text. Defending the principle of faithful agency, textualists have argued that early federal courts initially asserted, but ultimately abandoned, a claim to such power as their understanding of the constitutional structure sharpened. That argument is compelling, but incomplete. My research shows that even while disavowing a broad equitable authority to contradict statutory text, early federal courts asserted a narrower power to strain it through the application of substantive canons. Indeed, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, federal courts both created and applied canons that permitted them to exchange the most natural reading of a statute for a bearable one more protective of a judicially specified value. To the extent that they did so, the historical record suggests that early federal courts understood the norm of faithful agency to be qualified in ways that textualists have not acknowledged.

The next two Parts of the Article study whether a qualified norm of faithful agency is consistent with the constitutional structure. Part III begins by rejecting an argument that textualists have advanced to reconcile substantive canons with the Constitution. Textualists have suggested that, in the modern landscape, those principles that we call substantive canons are a closed set of background assumptions justified by their sheer longevity. Many of the substantive canons in use today began as judicial policy choices, but, the argument goes, courts have used them for so long that they are now part of the way that lawyers think about language. Judges can legitimately rely on these once-substantive canons because the canons are now effectively linguistic, but they cannot add new canons to the set. Part III concludes that this explanation is insufficient. If the theory is that federal courts once possessed the power to develop substantive canons, there is no reason to believe that they lost that power as time progressed. If the theory is that federal courts acted outside the bounds of their authority in adopting these canons, then faithful agents must explain their continued reliance upon them. Moreover, the fact that courts historically asserted the authority to make these interpretive policy choices is equally consistent with the proposition that such authority is included within ?the judicial Power? as with the proposition that the authority is a historical anomaly.

Part IV considers how the structural principles that otherwise constrain the exercise of the judicial power might constrain the application of substantive canons. It begins with the baseline principle that a substantive canon can never be applied to overcome the plain language of a statute. It then turns to a more nuanced problem: the application of canons to reject the most natural interpretation of a statute in favor of a less plausible one that advances a particular value. Insofar as any canon respects the outer limits of statutory language, it is less problematic than those approaches to statutory interpretation ? namely, equitable interpretation and the absurdity doctrine ? that permit deviation from plain statutory text. But insofar as any canon permits a departure from a text?s most natural meaning, that departure must be reconciled with the constitutional structure. Part IV argues that to the extent a canon is constitutionally inspired, its application does not necessarily conflict with the structural norms that constrain judges from engaging in broad, equitable interpretation. Instead of pursuing undifferentiated social values ? however sound and desirable they may be ? constitutionally inspired canons draw from an identifiable, closed set of norms. As such, their effect on the legislative bargain is more predictable than the application of open-ended doctrines like equitable interpretation and absurdity. Moreover, the connection of such canons to the Constitution provides a potential justification for their deviation from the norm of faithful agency. When a conflict exists between a statute and the Constitution, federal courts are obliged to side with the Constitution, rendering the exercise of judicial review itself a significant exception to the norm of faithful agency. Part IV tentatively concludes that the power of judicial review carries with it a subsidiary power to push ? though not force ? statutory language in directions that better accommodate constitutional values.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on February 19, 2010 (boomark / email).