Document Type
Article
Publication Date
5-21-2013
Abstract
In this writing, the author applies a “decision theory” of statutory interpretation, elaborated recently in the Yale Law Journal, to Professor William Eskridge’s illustrative case, Babbitt v. Sweet Home Chapter of Communities for a Great Oregon. In the course of this application, she takes issue with the conventional wisdom that purposivism, as a method of statutory interpretation, is inevitably a more virtuous model of statutory interpretation. First, the author questions whether we have a clear enough jurisprudential picture both of judicial discretion and legal as opposed to political normativity. Second, she argues that, under decision theory, Sweet Home is a far easier case than either Justice Stevens’s or Justice Scalia’s opinions reveal. Finally, the author critiques both opinions for failing to rely on norms borrowed from Congress’s actual decisions in the 1982 Endangered Species Act Amendments. The question then, is not “norms or not,” but whose norms, Congress’s or the courts’, should apply.
Publication Citation
57 St. Louis U. L.J. 909-930 (2013)
Scholarly Commons Citation
Nourse, Victoria, "Decision Theory and Babbitt v. Sweet Home: Skepticism About Norms, Discretion, and the Virtues of Purposivism" (2013). Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works. 1220.
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1220
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