The Ersatz of the Plain-Meaning Rule of Statutory Construction in Sackett v. EPA (II)

Authors

Dana Neacsu

Abstract

This essay uses the United States Supreme Court second decision in Sackett v. EPA,¹ or Sackett (II), to stress the obvious: judges are tasked with decoding the nation's laws for everyone's understanding. Or, in the words of John Marshall: "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is."² Later that century, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. further clarified that judicial duty: "Thereupon we ask, not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in circumstances in which they were used. . . ."3 Decades later, Justice Holmes would presciently add: "A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought, and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used."⁴

First Page

275

Recommended Citation

Dana Neacsu, The Ersatz of the Plain-Meaning Rule of Statutory Construction in Sackett v. EPA (II), 62 Duq. L. Rev. 275 (2024).
Available at: https://dsc.duq.edu/dlr/vol62/iss2/4