SCOTUSBlog: Justice Jackson reignites the interpretation wars, adding to textualism’s emerging cracks

SCOTUSBlog: Justice Jackson reignites the interpretation wars, adding to textualism’s emerging cracks by Abbe Gluck:

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson may be starting a statutory-interpretation revolution.

Jackson’s third full term was a doozy of separate opinions. Notably, a series of those opinions were written specifically to protest the majority’s refusal to consult legislative history in statutory cases – the first shots in a methodological battle along lines not seen in more than a decade. Legislative history includes materials produced by Congress during the legislative process, like committee and conference reports. Jackson spent a large part of this term urging her colleagues to care about what Congress was actually trying to do in a statute rather than just answer the question themselves. In this sense, the legislative history battle can be seen as another arm of attack against the court’s effort to diminish deference to other branches and consolidate more power unto itself.

The Goliath that Jackson is using her slingshot against is textualism, the dominant interpretive methodology at the court that for some time now has been thought the undeniable victor of decades worth of statutory interpretation wars. …