Suchergebnisse

The Supreme Court of Tennessee reconsidered several problems in the field of Statutory Interpretation during the Survey period, but its decisions largely followed principles already established in Tennessee and other jurisdictions. Constitutional Requirements Certain problems in the field of legislation arise in Tennessee by reason of state constitutional provisions. The Court is committed to the position of interpreting these provisions more or less irrespective of the construction of comparable provisions in other state constitutions.' The Constitution of the State of Tennessee provides: "No bill shall become a law, which embraces more than one subject; that subject to be expressed in the title." A chief justice of the Tennessee Supreme Court who was a member of the constitutional convention of 1870 which drafted this provision has explained its purpose: "The Convention evidently designed to cut up by the roots, not only the pernicious system of legislation, which embraced in one act incongruous and independent subjects, but also the evil practice of giving titles to acts which conveyed no real information as to the objects embraced in its provisions." The title of a statute may be either narrow and restricted or broad and general, as the legislature may determine. In either case, if the legislation under the title is germane to the general subject, it is not invalid under the one-subject provision. If the title is general, it justifies provisions in the body of the statute not incongruous with its provisions as to the manner, means and instrumentality whereby it may be enforced or its purpose accomplished.

Debates about statutory interpretation typically proceed on the assumption that statutes have linguistic meanings that we can identify in the same way that we identify the meaning of utterances in ordinary conversation. But that premise is false. We identify the meaning of conversational utterances largely based on inferences about what the speaker intended to communicate. With legislatures, as now is widely recognized, there is no unitary speaker with the sort of communicative intentions that speakers in ordinary conversation possess. One might expect this recognition to trigger abandonment of the model of conversational interpretation as a framework for interpreting statutes. Instead, interpreters invent legislative intentions—purportedly "objective" ones for textualists—or purposes. With those inventions in place, judges and theorists then carry on talking about what statutes mean, or would mean to a reasonable person, as if there were a linguistic fact of the matter even in intelligibly disputed cases. But this is a deep and systematic error. Mainstream thinking about statutory interpretation needs a major reorientation. Contrary to widespread impressions, debates about statutory interpretation are not about what statutes mean as a matter of linguistic fact, but about which grounds for the attribution of an invented meaning would best promote judicial and governmental legitimacy. Having recognized that the model of conversational interpretation cannot ground claims about statutes' meanings in disputed cases, we also need to rethink the role of legislatures and courts in a political democracy. There are limits to what legislatures can reasonably be expected to accomplish. Courts need to play the role of helpmates to the legislature, not just faithful agents. In the interpretation of statutes, linguistic intuitions should matter, but primarily for normative reasons, involving justice and fairness in the coercive application of law, and not because they reveal the legislature's linguistically clear dictates.