Alito cautions against ‘the court’s heavy reliance’ on canon

Trial Notebook

By Steven P. Garmisa

Hoey & Farina

Posted June 4, 2021 11:12 AM

This is the second of a two-part column. The first part appeared Thursday.One of the 57 canons of statutory construction listed by Bryan A. Garner and the late Justice Antonin Scalia in “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts” (2012) is the series–qualifier canon. “But, as one observer noted, nobody proposed this maxim as a canon until Justice Scalia ‘pioneered’ it in his book a few years ago.” William Baude and Stephen Sachs, “The Law of Interpretation,” 130 …

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