we've spent a fair amount of time in this course on the role of cases in our system and that's mostly because it's common law oriented and common law is built around cases nonetheless you should know that much law even in a common law jurisdiction is today based on statutes or rules passed in legislation from the legislature whether that is a state legislature or congress at the national level so this lesson will focus on statutory analysis and some of the basics you should know about statutory analysis is that when a statute applies parties are stuck with the text of a statute in other words it is not reasonable to argue oh no the statute doesn't say what it says it should say something else while cases can be overruled courts do not have the ability to rewrite the text of a statute therefore what parties will argue over when in a statutory dispute is what the statute means given the fact that both sides are stuck with what it says now when possible and it often is possible court's preference and it is a strong preference is to follow the plain meaning of a statute but as we'll see there can be a great deal of debate over what exactly the plain meaning is where a statute however does not have a plain meaning it is ambiguous or it is unclear in some way courts will try to resort to tools of statutory interpretation and among those tools of interpretation are some things called canons of construction and we'll go through a list of those canons in just a moment and the reason we're doing this is not because you're going to remember these canons of construction for all time but you do need to be able to recognize them when you are dealing with legal materials at some time in your career or professional endeavors so let's talk about the plain meaning rule and that is the rule that is the point of first resort for most courts the preferred interpretation of any statute is going to be according to its plain meaning you read it and you do what it says if the text as is commonly understood has a usual meaning then courts ought to follow that and most courts and their opinions will agree with this statement follow the ordinary meaning however lawyers will where possible to do so argue that their clients interpretation or more specifically the interpretation that gives the better result to their clients actually is the plain meaning so when contrary interpretations are available then having an argument that is based on tools of statutory interpretation is advisable let me put this all another way just because you read a statute and decide oh it means what i want it to mean don't just leave it at that have backup arguments have other arguments available as to why the statute ought to mean what you want it to mean when you happen to be the party in a lawsuit and lawyers are very useful in generating these sort of arguments now what the plane meaning is can come from any number of sources one that has come into surprisingly popular use in recent years is dictionaries and there are people who are quite fond of using dictionaries in legal arguments and there are some who are opposed to them the problem with dictionaries of course is that there are many many dictionaries and some words have conflicting meanings even within their own definition so i throw this out there just to let you know that dictionaries are a possible source of determining plain meaning of a statute but realize that they may not be determinative so when i refer to tools of statutory interpretation what exactly do i mean they're really any set of analytical methods that could potentially be used to explain a statute's meaning one for example is statutory context if we look at where a statutory scheme is located such as its definition section what its title or preamble may be what surrounding sections of a given statute mean that might provide a clue for unlocking the better meaning of the statute that is in question so that argument might look something like this your honor the term vehicle does not include go cards why not because this chapter of the statute deals only with vehicles to which the state issues license plates and since this chapter deals with license plate issuance it can't deal with go-karts for which license plates are not issued again that may not resolve the question but it's a fairly persuasive argument if you have it available so statutory context is important what about legislative history when congress or state legislatures are deciding whether or not to enact legislation they produce a paper trail this may be committee reports it might be public statements by legislators such as speeches on the floor of the house or the senate and that information can be useful in determining based on what was said about the bill what the final law will actually mean so attorneys who research legislative history will look through all steps of the process what did the house do what did the senate or the assembly do in this case and realize that this process generates hearings and it generates reports and every one of those is a potential place to pull out pieces of legislative history i'll give you one cautionary moment here and that is that legislative history is disfavored by some courts and the theory behind this is that legislative history involves statements by only some members of the legislature therefore it is not necessarily fairly representative of the entire body and those judges tend to view textualism as a better approach because the only thing that the entire legislature agreed on as a body is the text of a statute nonetheless it's good to know about legislative history because it often can answer some questions about what the congress or state legislature was thinking at the time of enactment another important tool of statutory interpretation is administrative agency interpretation if a government body on the executive branch has put out some sort of guidance about what a statute means courts will tend to be deferential to that guidance whether it's in the form of regulations or whether it's in the form of some other publication that's put out for public consumption so courts will often consider they may not agree with it but they will usually consider how parts of the executive branch have interpreted a statute now these determinations will often resolve the question if it's in an area that has been delegated to the particular executive agency by congress now one thing to beware about is that agencies because they are subject to the whim of elections will sometimes change their interpretations over time as a result something that's an interpretation that is good law in one year may be yanked back by an agency in another year why because a different party is in control of the executive branch so beware of that agency interpretations are given much deference but courts recognize that they can change over time another tool of statutory interpretation that we'll spend a little bit of time on is the so-called canons of statutory interpretation these are nice pithy sayings or interpretive guidelines that courts have developed over many years and they are accorded some degree of respect although we'll see that sometimes they do not themselves answer a question now when i refer to canons of statutory interpretation that's canon with one end not two ends and so these aren't things that we actually fire off to try to destroy medieval city walls so be sure that you're thinking about the right kinds of cannons let's look at some of these examples many of them are in latin like this one in paris materia or unlike subject matter and this canon holds that courts should interpret the same language in different parts of the statute consistently if it means one thing in one place it ought to mean the same thing in another place another statutory canon egustom generis or of the same kind this effectively is a rule that general terms in a list of terms should be interpreted to be of the same type and the same character as more specific items that are on the list so justin generis is a way of dealing with lists that might appear in a particular statute another one of our latin canons of construction is nossiter associates which means that a statute can be known or a word in a statute can be known from its associates or the company it keeps if words are of a particular kind then we ought to know what a given word means by the meaning of the words that are around it interestingly this particular canon can be twisted around to mean what's gotta mean something different than what the other words mean we also have a canon called presumption against surplusage and that simply means if an interpretation being urged means that some words would be useless then we should reject that interpretation because every word in a statute should contribute to its meaning why is that because the legislature is not presumed to do a useless act and if we're going to if one interpretation is going to make some of the words useless we ought not to go along with that interpretation another statutory canon is the broad construction of remedial statutes what does that mean when where the legislature sought to deal with a particular problem a statute should be interpreted in a way that accomplishes that purpose and that's fairly common sense that where the legislature was trying to solve a particular issue let's say with a minimum wage act then a reading of a statute that would go against that would actually deprive the application of a party receiving the minimum wage that interpretation ought to be rejected by the same token let's say a statute is part of the clean air act and the idea there was reducing the amount of pollution in the air then the interpretations under the clean air act of what the various sections mean ought to be consistent with that purpose back to latin expressionis exclusio altarius or the expression of one excludes the others that canon of construction simply means where a statute contains a list of specific terms then we ought to assume whatever is not listed was intentionally omitted that the legislature knew how to include certain words and the fact that it has not included certain words ought to be given weight another statutory canon titles do not affect interpretation the title of a statute is often considered to be an editorial convenience and therefore if it doesn't if it isn't consistent with the actual statutory language we should just disregard the title and go with what the statutory language means in the event of a conflict also there is a canon that courts should avoid constitutional questions if it is possible to do so and that simply means if we can interpret the underlying statute in such a way that it does not raise a problem of it being constitutional then we ought to interpret the statute in that way finally in criminal law there is a canon called the rule of lenity that when a criminal statute is ambiguous it should be interpreted in a way that favors the accused that is the criminal defendant and the idea there is it's a it is a weighty thing for someone to be placed in criminal jeopardy and uncertain laws ought not to be a basis for doing so the criminal law in particular needs to be certain and ambiguous crimes should not be ones that are enforced against the citizenry carl luellen who was a great legal scholar of the middle of the 20th century was very cautionary about these canons and what he said in a famous law review article in the vanderbilt law review in 1950 was this when it comes to presenting a proposed construction in court there is an accepted conventional vocabulary as in argument over points of case law the accepted convention still unhappily requires discussion as if only one single correct meaning could exist hence there are two opposing canons on almost every point every lawyer must be familiar with them all they are still needed tools of argument what lou ellen was saying here in his reference to two opposing cannons on every point is the fact that most cannons don't answer the question rather they are an invitation for the attorney on the other side to dig up another cannon another one of these latin phrases to say oh no no the statute ought to be read a different way and lou ellen is right in many instances so having said that that arguments will involve canons of construction when we try to determine what statutes mean realize sometimes the cannons will cancel each other out or one side's argument maybe if it's more clever and robust than its use of cannons will prevail because the other side decided to disarm itself and didn't actually investigate the cannons of construction as a future client you don't want that to happen to you and so make sure that your attorney will use all reasonable arguments that are available by the way since we're talking about canons of construction don't forget about our most basic one that applies to all legal rules story decisis where a court has already interpreted the meaning of a statute that interpretation is binding on the courts that are below it you may not have to bring out cannons of construction because the question has already been decided so a statute that once was at least arguably ambiguous on its face may no longer be so because courts have already construed its meaning and clarified it and that clarification though not in the text of the statute does appear in the case law now beware in these situations however of circuit splits or regional splits perhaps within a state courts in different jurisdictions could possibly have reached different results just because a court in one circuit let's say the fifth circuit has reached a conclusion that doesn't mean that a court in a different circuit let's say the ninth circuit is going to reach the same result now in those cases the u.s supreme court might have to resolve the split but in the meantime the law can be different in the state of texas than it is say in the state of arizona even if it's a federal law why is that because those states are located in different federal circuits that brings us to the end of this lesson on statutory analysis and the canons and tools of statutory interpretation