Thursday, July 8, 2004

Nancy Staudt (Washington Univ.) presented Competing Models of Statutory Interpretation at the Critical Tax Conference at Rutgers-Newark. Here is part of the Introduction:

For purposes of this study, we selected an area of the law that has kept both the Supreme Court and Congress busy throughout the Twentieth Century—taxation. The Court has decided more than 1,000 tax cases between 1900-2000, and Congress has reconsidered the tax laws nearly every year over that same time period. In choosing taxation as our area of study, we move considerably beyond the existing empirical studies of statutory interpretation—all of which focus on civil rights controversies….

In Section II, we describe five prominent theories of statutory interpretation. The first model, the sincere political model of decision making, posits that Supreme Court justices are motivated bytheir own political beliefs in the interpretive process and this motivation leads to legal outcomes that reflect the Court’s own sincerely held policy positions. The second and third models, the textualist and intentionalist approaches, argue the Court may be driven more by jurisprudential considerations—namely promoting the law as set out in the statute or legislative history. The fourth model, the sincere deferential model of voting, holds that the Court will defer to agency interpretations of the statute for purposes of reaching outcomes. Finally, the fifth model of decision making, the strategic model, is agnostic as the justices particular aims or goals; instead,this model posits a rational Court that will reach outcomes that take into consideration not only the justices’ own preferences (be they political or jurisprudential) but also the preferences of the all the other relevant actors in the legal and political setting. These five models, widely investigated in the legal and social science literatures, each contain empirical claims about judging and, in particular, statutory interpretation. Accordingly, in addition to describing the underlying theory of each model, we explain the empirical implications of each.

In Section III, we investigate how the Court itself describes its decision making procedures; in this section we examine the Court’s stated rationales for reaching outcomes in the many tax controversies it has considered. Finally in Section IV, we devise statistical models to test the theories of statutory interpretation against our data.