Remarks on the Theory of Appellate Decision and the Rules or Canons about How Statutes Are to Be Construed
Llewellyn, Karl N.
Citation analytics
How this journal article sits in the citation network, derived from CiteLaw's graph of published opinions.
Citations by decade
Courts citing this journal article
Most recently cited by10
- 2024STATE OF FLORIDA VS ANDREW SCOTT CROSE Fla. Dist. Ct. App.
- 2022Friends of the Black River Forest v. DNR Wis.
- 2021United States v. Duane Nishiie 9th Cir.
- 2019Wilton Campus 1691, LLC v. Wilton Conn. App. Ct.
- 2019State ex rel. Hillman v. Beger Mo.
- 2016New England Survey Systems, Inc. v. Department of Industrial Accidents Mass. App. Ct.
- 2016Meister v. Meister Wis.
- 2016Lockhart v. United States U.S.
- 2015California Foundation for Independent Living Centers v. County of Sacramento E.D. Cal.
- 2011In re Read Bankr. M.D. Fla.
Counts reflect decisions in the CiteLaw corpus and may lag very recent opinions.
Abstract
If a statute is to make sense, it must be read in the light of some assumed purpose. A statute merely declaring a rule, with no purpose or objective, is nonsense. If a statute is to be merged into a going system of law, moreover, the court must do the merging, and must in so doing take account of the policy of the statute-or else substitute its own version of such policy. Creative re- shaping of the net result is thus inevitable.
But the policy of a statute is of two wholly different kinds-each kind somewhat limited in effect by the statute's choice of measures, and by the statute's choice of fixed language. On the one hand there are the ideas consciously before the draftsmen, the committee, the legislature: a known evil to be cured, a known goal to be attained, a deliberate choice of one line of approach rather than another. Here talk of "intent" is reasonably realistic; committee reports, legislative debate, historical knowledge of contemporary thinking or campaigning which points up the evil or the goal can have significance.