1702692660 Although at first glance cases that require the justices to interpret statutes might seem simpler, the statutory side of the Court’s docket presents many of the same challenges and has provoked similar disputes over basic principles of interpretation.

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1702692662 If a statute was perfectly clear, chances are that it would not be the subject of a Supreme Court case. But it is the rare statute that by its own terms answers every question that might arise. Perhaps Congress failed to anticipate the full range of situations in which the statute might be invoked. Or, quite often, the task of addressing all the possible applications of a bill under consideration exceeds the legislative appetite for detail or requires one compromise too many. Congress is then quite happy to let the courts fill in the blanks. After all, unlike a constitutional ruling, a ruling on the meaning of a statute can be overturned by new legislation if Congress concludes that the courts have come up with the wrong answer.

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1702692664 The Americans with Disabilities Act provides a vivid example. Since its enactment in 1990, this major civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, has been the subject of dozens of court decisions, including several major Supreme Court rulings. The law’s prohibitions are, for the most part, clear, but what is a disability? Congress provided only a spare definition:“(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.”The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with administering the law, in turn issued a regulation defining “major life activities” to include “functions such as caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, and working.”

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1702692666 A question arose quickly: what if someone had a condition that met one of the definitions but that could be mitigated by medication or by a medical device? Did the person still have a disability within the meaning of the law? Which counted, the corrected state or the uncorrected state? The statute and the regulations were silent. Two women with poor but completely correctable eyesight brought a lawsuit under the act after they were turned down for jobs as airline pilots. They argued that since they had been denied employment on the basis of their eyesight, they should be considered disabled and protected against employment discrimination. The Supreme Court found otherwise in Sutton v. United Airlines (1999), noting that with glasses, the women were not limited in any major life activity. Congress intended to limit the law’s coverage “to only those whose impairments are not mitigated by corrective measures,” the Court concluded. A man whose high blood pressure was controlled by medication was fired from his job as a commercial truck driver when the employer learned of his hypertension diagnosis. He sued, arguing that the law protected him. In Murphy v. United Parcel Service (1999), the Supreme Court rejected the claim, on the same ground: when medicated, the truck driver was not limited in a major life activity. Finally, confronted with a tide of individual claims, the Court attempted a more general clarification. In Toyota Motor Mfg. v. Williams (2002), the justices rejected the claim of a woman who was unable to continue in her assembly-line job because carpal-tunnel syndrome limited her ability to perform the required manual tasks. The Court held that “the central inquiry must be whether the claimant is unable to perform the variety of tasks central to most people’s daily lives, not whether the claimant is unable to perform the tasks associated with her specific job.”

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1702692668 It is worth noting that the first two decisions were not unanimous. Two justices, Stevens and Breyer, objected in dissent, in the case of the nearsighted pilots, that the Court had reached the “counterintuitive conclusion” that the law’s “safeguards vanish when individuals make themselves more employable by ascertaining ways to overcome their physical or mental limitations. Observing that the Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to redress a common cause of discrimination, the two justices said that rather than read the law narrowly, the Court should follow “a familiar canon of statutory construction that remedial legislation should be construed broadly to effectuate its purposes.”

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1702692670 The disability cases thus illustrate conflicting approaches to the task of statutory interpretation: one, an effort to fit the case at hand to the statute’s precise words, and the other, an effort to step back and interpret the statute in light of the congressional purpose in enacting it. To ascertain purpose often requires reference to the statute’s legislative history—to the floor debates, the records of committee hearings, committee reports, and the final reports of the Senate and House of Representatives. For the disability act, as the dissenters pointed out, these materials made it clear that whether a person had a disability was to be determined based on the person’s uncorrected state; a person with hearing loss, for example, was to be deemed limited in the major life activity of hearing without regard to whether hearing aids could correct the problem.

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1702692672 Justice Breyer has argued that courts, as “partners in the enterprise,” should use the materials at hand to help Congress carry out its legislative purposes. Justice Scalia, by contrast, refuses to cite legislative history at all, due to what he considers its unreliability and “manipulability” by congressional staff members. Rather than guess at an underlying purpose, he argues, courts should simply hold Congress to the precise language that it enacts into law. Other justices consider legislative history to be an informative tool at least some of the time.

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1702692674 Administrative agencies

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1702692676 The steady growth of the administrative state means that the Supreme Court is often presented with the question of whether an administrative agency is properly carrying out its assigned duties. Notable cases in recent years have been driven by disputes over environmental policy and the enforcement, or lack of enforcement, of the nation’s environmental laws. Although the Clean Air Act and the Clear Water Act are decades old, dating to the 1970s, disputes over these statutes continue to provide the Court with a steady diet of cases.

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1702692678 If the statute governing an agency is unclear as to the matter at hand, the Court will defer to the agency’s plausible interpretation of its mandate. But if the statute is unambiguous, the Court directs the agency to carry out the will of Congress.

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1702692680 The refusal of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate motor vehicle emissions of carbon dioxide and three other heattrapping gasses presented such a case late in the administration of President George W. Bush. The agency had turned down a petition from a coalition of environmental groups requesting it to initiate a formal rule-making process leading to the regulation of “tailpipe emissions” associated with climate change. In refusing to act, the EPA said it lacked authority under the Clean Air Act because the so-called greenhouse gasses were not “air pollutants” within the meaning of the statute. In an appeal brought by Massachusetts, other states, and a group of environmental organizations, the Court disagreed, noting that the Clean Air act was “unambiguous”in including these gasses within its “sweeping definition” of “air pollutants.” Going forward, the Court said in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency (2007), the agency could refuse to regulate only if it could provide a reason for doing so based on science, not policy. (Two years later, the Obama administration issued new regulations governing emissions from cars and light trucks.)

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1702692682 This case was notable for another dimension beyond administrative law. Four justices argued in dissent that the Court lacked authority to decide the case because the agency’s challengers did not have “standing”; they could not show, the dissenters said, that they suffered any actual injury from the refusal to regulate. Thus according to the dissent, the dispute was not the kind of “case” or “controversy” that met the Article III requirements for jurisdiction.

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1702692684 Consideration of this argument brings us back to a discussion of the obstacles to jurisdiction in the Supreme Court and the other federal courts. The Court has spent many years interpreting the words “cases” and “controversies.” From the beginning, the Court has refused to offer advisory opinions. There must be a concrete dispute between adversarial parties, one that is ripe for adjudication and not rendered moot by some intervening event. Essential to meeting the case-and-controversy requirement is a plaintiff with standing, a concept with three elements. First, the party bringing the suit must have suffered an injury that is actual or imminent—that is, not hypothetical—and particularized—that is, personal and not shared with the population as a whole.(This requirement eliminates most forms of “taxpayer standing”; members of the public do not have a right, simply by virtue of their status as taxpayers, to go to court to challenge policies they disagree with or believe to be unconstitutional.) Second, the plaintiff must show that the defendant caused the injury by an unlawful action or failure to act. Third, the injury must be of a sort for which a court can actually grant relief. These three requirements are often boiled down to the shorthand: “injury-infact, causation, and redressability.”

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1702692686 The majority in the Environmental Protection Agency case found that at least one of the multiple plaintiffs, Massachusetts, met all three requirements. The state faced losing coastal land to rising seas (“injury-in-fact”) in a process due at least incrementally to the contribution that emissions from motor vehicles were making to global warming (“causation”). And regulation by the agency to reduce the emissions would at least to some degree mitigate the problem (“redressability”). The dissenters argued that the state met none of the requirements: that its assertion of injury was conjectural, not sufficiently traceable to the agency’s inaction, and insufficiently likely to be redressed by regulation. The lawsuit, the dissenters concluded, did not meet the case-or-controversy requirement of Article III.

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1702692688 Clearly, jurisdictional issues such as these are contested territory in the modern Supreme Court. As this case demonstrates, each jurisdictional requirement is open to interpretation. The concepts at issue are not static. The Court’s willingness to find standing has expanded and contracted over time, often reflecting how closely the justices care to scrutinize the activity of the other branches of government. Jurisdictional questions may appear technical and arcane, but they provide an indispensable window into how the justices see the Court’s role at a given point in time.

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1702692690 One final observation: since the Court operates by majority rule, justices are effective at projecting their personal views only to the extent that they can persuade others. That is not to say that individual views are unimportant. On a closely divided Court, a justice can withhold a vote from one group and cost that side a majority. But to shape the law affirmatively, a justice needs allies, usually four of them. Further, the norm of adjudication requires giving reasons. A Supreme Court opinion typically describes the facts of the case and the range of relevant precedents and legal principles, and then gives the reasons why one legal path rather than another leads to the correct resolution. Any of those steps—fitting the facts together, describing the relevant law, and choosing a path to the final judgment—may be contested in a given case, and a justice writing a majority opinion must persuade a majority of all three if the opinion is actually to speak for “the Court.”

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1702692695 美国最高法院通识读本 [:1702690384]

1702692696 美国最高法院通识读本 Chapter 3The justices

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1702692698 There are no formal requirements for becoming a Supreme Court justice. The Constitution requires a senator to have reached the age of thirty, and a president to be at least thirty-five and a“natural born citizen,” but it sets no comparable rules for justices. Theoretically, anyone who can get nominated by the president and confirmed by a majority vote of the Senate can be a Supreme Court justice. Everyone who has served on the Court has been a lawyer, however, although many of the early justices were not law school graduates; as was customary, they had “read law” under the supervision of a member of the bar. (The last justice without a formal legal education was Robert H. Jackson, who joined the Court in 1941; he had been admitted to the New York bar after only one year of law school.)

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1702692700 After setting the membership of the Supreme Court at six (one chief and five associate justices) in the first Judiciary Act, Congress proceeded to change the number of justices five times: to seven in 1807, nine in 1837, ten in 1863 (the tenth seat was never filled), and seven again in 1866 before settling at the present nine in 1869. While perceptions of the Court’s workload played a role in the variable number of seats, so did politics: the 1866 elimination of two seats effectively prevented President Andrew Johnson from making any Supreme Court appointments, while the increase to nine after the election of President Ulysses S. Grant gave the new president two new seats to fill. In 1937 Congress rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add a new justice, up to a total of fifteen, any time an incumbent reached the age of seventy and refused to retire. While it is unlikely that the size of the Court will ever change again, some scholars, troubled by the increasing length of service on the Court and the advanced age at which justices retire, have recently put forward a proposal that would add new justices, move the oldest into a senior status, and assign the Court’s active work to the most junior nine.

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1702692702 Initially, the Court’s membership was entirely Protestant as well as, needless to say, white and male. The first Roman Catholic on the Court was the fifth chief justice, Roger B. Taney, appointed in 1836. Not until Thurgood Marshall’s appointment in 1967 was the Court’s membership anything other than all white, and not until Sandra Day O’Connor joined the Court in 1981 was it anything other than all male. Since then, the Court has slowly come to reflect more of the nation’s diversity, although the reflection is not without distortions. On Thurgood Marshall’s retirement in 1991, his seat was filled by a second African American, Clarence Thomas. Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined O’Connor on the bench in 1993. The Court that convened on October 4, 2010, for the start of its new term included three women (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan); one African American, Thomas; one Latina, Sotomayor; six Catholics; and three Jews. John Paul Stevens was the only Protestant on the Court when he retired in 2010. The nomination of the first Jewish justice, Louis D. Brandeis in 1916, had stirred controversy, and for many years there was a sole“Jewish seat” on the Court. But by the time Elena Kagan joined the Court in 2010 as one of three Jewish justices (with Ginsburg and Breyer), a nominee’s religious background was generally viewed as irrelevant.

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1702692704 So too was a justice’s place of origin. For many years, presidents had tried to achieve some geographic balance on the Court, reflecting the notion that different regions of the country had different interests and perspectives that the Court should reflect. But geography had long since faded as a salient factor in Supreme Court nominations by the time Kagan joined the Court as a fourth New Yorker (with Scalia, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor). Neighboring New Jersey produced a fifth justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr.

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1702692709 3. The only four women ever to serve on the Supreme Court gather at the Court for Justice Elena Kagan’s investiture, October 1, 2010. From right to left, Justice Kagan with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor and retired Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

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