Reading Law Quotes

“As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it: “We do not inquire what the legislature meant; we ask only what the statute means.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Words change meaning over time, and often in unpredictable ways. Queen Anne is said (probably apocryphally) to have commented about Sir Christopher Wren's architecture at St. Paul's Cathedral that it was "awful, artificial, and amusing"—by which she meant that it was awe-inspiring, highly artistic, and thought-provoking.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country’s founding document: “The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“It is in no way remarkable, and in no way a vindication of textual evolutionism, that taking power from the people and placing it instead with a judicial aristocracy can produce some creditable results that democracy might not achieve. The same can be said of monarchy and totalitarianism. But once a nation has decided that democracy, with all its warts, is the best system of government, the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“For example, the ambiguities in a contract will be construed against the party that drafted the document (contra proferentem).”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“In the context of defining victim, an organization that voluntarily takes care of an abused animal can hardly be considered to have suffered loss.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“precious metals.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Following the general term with specifics can serve the function of making doubly sure that the broad (and intended-to-be-broad) general term is taken to include the specifics.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“[E]jusdem generis . . . says that if a series of more than two items ends with a catch-all term that is broader than the category into which the preceding items fall but which those items do not exhaust, the catch-all term is presumably intended to be no broader than that category.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“The ejusdem generis canon asserts that a general phrase at the end of a list is limited to the same type of things (the generic category) that are found in the specific list.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“some authorities use this canon at that broad level of generality.1 But we mean something more specific. When several nouns or verbs or adjectives or adverbs—any words—are associated in a context suggesting that the words have something in common, they should be assigned a permissible meaning that makes them similar.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“noscitur a sociis”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“A specific statutory provision that contravenes a general constitutional injunction or prohibition is invalid.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Where there is no clear intention otherwise, a specific statute will not be controlled or nullified by a general one, regardless of the priority of enactment.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“But the general/ specific canon makes all the difference if the general provision has been enacted later.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“So where there is a conflict between a general provision and a specific one, whichever was enacted later might be thought to prevail. But that analysis disregards the principle behind the general/specific canon—namely, that the two provisions are not in conflict, but can exist in harmony. The specific provision does not negate the general one entirely, but only in its application to the situation that the specific provision covers. Hence the canon does apply to successive statutes.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“the serial comma—that is, the comma after the penultimate item in a series and just before the conjunction (a, b, and c). Authorities on English usage overwhelmingly recommend using the serial comma to prevent ambiguities.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“It can convert nouns into verbs, and change a description of a panda bear (“Eats shoots and leaves”) into a description of Jesse James (“Eats, shoots, and leaves”). No intelligent construction of a text can ignore its punctuation.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“With a legislative assembly, the same may or may not be true. If a legislative printing office formats bills in its own way after their passage, then the formatting is simply not part of the adopted text and is irrelevant.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Properly speaking, a proviso is a clause that introduces a condition by the word provided.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“The last-antecedent canon may be superseded by another grammatical convention: A pronoun that is the subject of a sentence and does not have an antecedent in that sentence ordinarily refers to the subject of the preceding sentence. And it almost always does so when it is the word that begins the sentence.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“British grammarian: “It is clearly desirable that an anaphoric (backward-looking) or cataphoric (forward-looking) pronoun should be placed as near as the construction allows to the noun or noun phrase to which it refers, and in such a manner that there is no risk of ambiguity.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“that is not just a relative pronoun but also a stand-alone pronoun, a demonstrative adjective, and a conjunction.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Notwithstanding anything herein to the contrary, a continuing-legal-education provider approved by the state bar may conduct seminars without fulfilling any other requirement.” There may be nothing to the contrary anywhere in the document—even nothing that could be thought to be to the contrary. But the catchall notwithstanding is a fail-safe way of ensuring that the clause it introduces will absolutely, positively prevail.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Notwithstanding performs a function opposite that of subject to.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“When that is meant, careful drafters would say A or B or both—or, if several items were to be listed, they would introduce the list with any one or more of the following.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“The literal sense of and/or is “both or either,”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“asyndeton (absence of conjunction) is normally equivalent to syndeton (use of the conjunction and).”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“What is the effect of failing to honor a mandatory provision’s terms? That is an issue for a treatise on remedies, not interpretation.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts

“Mandatory words impose a duty; permissive words grant discretion.”
― Antonin Scalia, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts