At Re's Judicata, Richard Re: Justice Kagan on Textualism’s Success. From the introduction:
Justice Elena Kagan recently gave the “Scalia Lecture” at Harvard Law School. The event, which is visible online, consisted of a conversation between Kagan and Professor John Manning. For those interested in interpretive trends at the Court, this video is worth watching. As a scholar-jurist, Kagan speaks both broadly and specifically about her approach to text. And besides being erudite and accessible, the conversation manages to be charming, too.
Kagan’s lecture reinforces a conventional wisdom on textualism’s recent success. Early on (9:10), Kagan beautifully describes the Scalian turn in statutory interpretation while acknowledging its incompleteness. Over time, anti-textualist views have fallen away, so that the center of gravity has moved toward Scalia. Yet Scalia still lies near one end of a spectrum. Both Kagan and Manning adduced evidence of this shift. But the most powerful proof of this claim is the lecture itself. When Kagan, a recent democratic appointee to the Supreme Court, gives a “Scalia Lecture” at Harvard Law School and says (8:25) that “we’re all textualists now,” she has already gone a long way toward proving that point.
But even Kagan’s nuanced lecture, like the conventional wisdom, may give an exaggerated impression of textualism’s ascendance. While certain strong versions of purposivism are all but vanquished, the Court’s most recent term and even Kagan’s own comments suggest that a more moderate, evolved form of purposive reasoning is alive and well…
RELATED: This article by Professor Re expands on his idea of modern purposivism, as reflected for example in Yates v. United States and King v. Burwell, and especially as associated with Chief Justice Roberts.
ALSO RELATED: Justice Scalia wrote for a unanimous Court in Shapiro v. McManus, a highly textualist opinion released yesterday.
Posted at 6:55 AM