Statutory Interpretation

What is statutory interpretation?

Legislatures write laws in general words; courts must apply them to specific situations nobody foresaw. Statutory interpretation is the set of methods judges use to decide what those words mean in a particular case. Is a bicycle a "vehicle"? Does "sex" in an employment discrimination law cover sexual orientation? Is a fish a "tangible object"? These questions have reached the U.S. Supreme Court, and the method chosen often decides the answer.

Interpretation raises a question of power as well as meaning. If judges stretch words to reach results they prefer, they act like legislators, which strains separation of powers. If they read words woodenly, they may defeat obvious legislative goals. Every method is an attempt to stay faithful to the legislature while still deciding cases.

The classic Korean and civil-law methods

Korean legal education, following the German tradition, teaches four main methods:

• Literal interpretation (문리해석): start with the ordinary meaning of the words and grammar.
• Systematic interpretation (체계적 해석): read the provision in light of related provisions and the statute as a whole.
• Historical interpretation (역사적 해석): consider the legislative history and what the drafters intended.
• Teleological interpretation (목적론적 해석): choose the meaning that best serves the provision's purpose.

Korea's Supreme Court has said interpretation should start from the ordinary meaning of the text and, within limits that don't depart from it, consider the purpose, history and structure of the law to find a reasonable meaning. Methods that go further include expansive and restrictive interpretation, and analogy, applying a rule to a similar case it doesn't cover. Analogy is allowed in civil law to fill gaps, but forbidden against the defendant in criminal law under nulla poena sine lege.

Every interpretive method begins with the words. The real debate is about when, if ever, a judge may leave them behind.

Textualism vs. purposivism in the U.S.

Textualism, championed by Justice Antonin Scalia, holds that the law is what the enacted text says, read as a reasonable person would have understood it when passed. Textualists distrust legislative history because only the text went through both houses and the President. Purposivism, associated with the Legal Process school of Henry Hart and Albert Sacks and with Justice Stephen Breyer, asks what problem Congress was trying to solve and reads the words to serve that goal, using committee reports and other history.

The famous older case is Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States (1892), where the Court held that a law banning contracts to import foreign "labor or service of any kind" didn't cover a church hiring an English pastor, because that wasn't the law's spirit. Textualists criticize the decision as judges overriding plain words. Modern textualism has won much ground: today almost every opinion starts with the text, and the disagreement is mostly over how much weight purpose and history get when the text is unclear.

Landmark modern cases

Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) shows that textualism doesn't map neatly onto politics. Writing for a 6–3 majority, Justice Gorsuch used textualist reasoning to hold that firing someone for being gay or transgender is discrimination "because of sex" under Title VII; the dissents, also invoking text, argued the words' 1964 public meaning didn't reach that far.

In Yates v. United States (2015), a fisherman threw undersized grouper overboard to avoid inspection and was charged under a Sarbanes-Oxley provision banning the destruction of "any record, document, or tangible object." A plurality held that, read in context, "tangible object" meant objects used to record information, not fish; the dissent said a fish is plainly a tangible object. King v. Burwell (2015) read "an Exchange established by the State" in the Affordable Care Act to include federally run exchanges, relying on the statute's structure and purpose.

Canons of construction

Canons are rules of thumb courts use to read statutes. Some are linguistic; others reflect policy choices.

• Noscitur a sociis: a word is known by its companions (used in Yates).
• Ejusdem generis: general words after a list cover only things of the same kind.
• Expressio unius: listing some things implies the exclusion of others.
• Rule against surplusage: don't read a provision so that other words do nothing.
• Rule of lenity: ambiguous criminal statutes are read in the defendant's favor.
• Constitutional avoidance: prefer a reading that avoids serious constitutional doubts.

Karl Llewellyn famously argued in 1950 that for nearly every canon there's an opposite one, so canons can justify almost any result. Defenders reply that canons still discipline reasoning and make outcomes more predictable, especially when applied consistently. Courts also give weight to their own past interpretations under stare decisis, which is especially strong for statutory precedents because Congress can amend the statute.

Interpretation in practice: Korea

Korean courts use the same tools with civil-law vocabulary. In criminal law, the line between permissible interpretation and forbidden analogy is the most tested issue: courts may consider purpose, but not beyond the possible meaning of the words, to the defendant's disadvantage. In administrative and tax law, courts often stress strict literal reading of taxing provisions under the principle of no taxation without law. A course essay working through customary law, retroactivity and analogy is The Principle of Legality in Korean Criminal Law: Ban on Customary Criminal Law, Non-Retroactivity, Ban on Analogy and Their Problems, and a study of delegated legislation and how far statutes may leave details to decrees is Overseas Financial Account Reporting and the Limits of Delegated Legislation: A Case Note on Korean Supreme Court 2019Do11381.

Interpretation is where law stops being a list of rules and becomes an argument. Learning the methods means learning how lawyers argue about words without pretending the words decide everything.

What is statutory interpretation in simple terms?

It's how courts decide what a law's words mean when applying them to a specific case.

What's the difference between textualism and purposivism?

Textualism focuses on the ordinary meaning of the enacted text; purposivism also considers the law's goals and legislative history.

What are canons of construction?

Rules of thumb for reading legal texts, such as reading a word in light of its neighbors or interpreting ambiguous criminal laws in the defendant's favor.

What methods do Korean courts use?

Literal, systematic, historical and teleological interpretation, starting from the text and staying within its possible meaning.

References and official sources

1. Statutory construction, Wex. Cornell LII
2. Statutory Interpretation: Theories, Tools, and Trends. Congressional Research Service
3. Bostock v. Clayton County, 590 U.S. 644 (2020). Justia
4. Yates v. United States, 574 U.S. 528 (2015). Justia
5. Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 143 U.S. 457 (1892). Justia
6. 형법. 국가법령정보센터