Forum

Against Bankruptcy: Public Litigation Values Versus the Endless Quest for Global Peace in Mass Litigation

For the first time in years, in the Purdue Pharma opioids litigation, the Court is reviewing an unorthodox bankruptcy maneuver aimed at securing global settlement. This Essay critiques corporate defendants’ increasingly common turn to bankruptcy to shut down, or avoid altogether, complex civil litig…

Forum

Reading the ACA’s Findings: Textualism, Severability and the ACA’s Return to the Court

Challengers are using false textualism to implode the ACA. They argue that a findings section is an “inseverability clause,” ignoring the text and location; the language is boilerplate not for severability but for the commerce power; and Congress’s actual inseverability clauses are unmistakably expl…

Essay

Our [National] Federalism

“National Federalism” best describes the modern allocation of state and federal power, but it is a federalism without doctrine. Federalism today comes primarily from Congress—through its decisions to give states prominent roles in federal schemes and so to ensure the stat…

Essay

Intrastatutory Federalism and Statutory Interpretation: State Implementation of Federal Law in Health Reform and Beyond

121 Yale L.J. 534 (2011).

State implementation of federal law is commonplace, but has been largely ignored by the interpretive doctrines of legislation and administrative law.  We have no Chevron, federalism canon, or anything else for state implementation, nor any doctrines that ask how Congress’s…

Article

Intersystemic Statutory Interpretation: Methodology as “Law” and the Erie Doctrine

120 Yale L.J. 1898 (2011). 

Do the Erie Doctrine and its “reverse-Erie” mirror require state and federal courts to apply one another’s statutory interpretation methodologies when they interpret one another’s statutes? Surprisingly, the courts have no consistent answer to this question—even though s…

Article

Intersystemic Statutory Interpretation: Methodology as “Law” and the Erie Doctrine

120 Yale L.J. 1898 (2011). 

Do the Erie Doctrine and its “reverse-Erie” mirror require state and federal courts to apply one another’s statutory interpretation methodologies when they interpret one another’s statutes? Surprisingly, the courts have no consistent answer to this question—even though s…

Article

The States as Laboratories of Statutory Interpretation: Methodological Consensus and the New Modified Textualism

119 Yale L.J. 1750 (2010). 

This Article offers the first close study of statutory interpretation in several state courts of last resort. While academics have spent the past decade speculating about the “death of textualism,” the utility of legislated rules of interpretation, and the capacity of ju…