[EL] Most surprising remark in today's oral argument in the Arizona redistricting case

[Scarberry, Mark]

Turning back to Justice Scalia's comment on dictionaries, it seems reasonable for him to say something like:

Every other use of legislature in the Constitution plainly means the representative legislative body. We should not pluck a meaning from dictionaries that is contrary to the meaning of the term as used in other parts of the document. When the legislature delegates power but retains the right to reclaim the power through the ordinary law-making process that gives the legislature a primary role, then the legislature is acting through its delegate. Here not only does the legislature under the AZ statute lack the power to reclaim the authority, it was not even given a role in the supposed act of delegation.

Are there cases in which Justice Scalia has argued that the same term used multiple times in a single act with one meaning can be interpreted to mean something different in a single use within that document where giving it the same meaning would not be absurd or plainly contrary to the purpose of the particular single use? He nearly became apoplectic when the Court did so in a bankruptcy case (Dewsnup, 1992), though he joined a unanimous opinion that gave a term in the Bankruptcy Code a different meaning in one place than in others, where there were strong indications that the purpose of the particular provision required that it be given a different meaning (Nobelman, 1993).

Mark

Mark S. Scarberry

Pepperdine University School of Law










-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20150303/a2151745/attachment.html>