Constitutional Conceits in Statutory Interpretation
My new article, Constitutional Conceits in Statutory Interpretation , was published this past week by the Administrative Law Review . (The Administrative Law Review does not permit authors to post papers online prior to publication, so this is the first time this piece has been publicly available.) Here is the paper's abstract: For all its talk about textualism, the Roberts Court has a recent habit of ignoring statutory texts in highly politicized cases. In NFIB v. OSHA , West Virginia v. EPA , and Brnovich v. DNC , the Supreme Court steered around broad statutory language to narrow important federal legislation. In each case, the Court brushed aside inconvenient statutory texts, focusing instead on background constitutional concerns. Significantly, though, the policies at issue were not unconstitutional under current doctrine. The challenged policies, then, did not violate constitutional law so much as the conservative Justices’ constitutional sensibilities. Admitted