'Let Sleeping Legal Dogs Lie': Decoding the Supreme Court’s Treatment of Circuit Court Consensus About Federal Statutory Meaning

Abstract

The proposition that words in a statute should take their ordinary meaning from the time that Congress enacted the statute appears to be accepted by most if not all of the current members of the Court. But practically speaking, in all but “a miniscule number of cases,” the Court never gets involved, making the Courts of Appeals the “final expositors of federal law in their geographical region” in most cases.

In some cases, the circuit courts may also reach a longstanding, substantial consensus about the meaning of the words in a federal statute. For decades, the public and the legal community may rely on a meaning as effectively settled by this consensus and may shape their behavior in society and in litigation settings accordingly. The geographical scope of this public reliance on a particular meaning may be wide-reaching, perhaps even nationwide.

Despite the odds, the Court has, on several occasions, re-examined statutory meaning that had arguably been settled by the circuit courts. And the Court has found that this settled meaning failed to match the “ordinary . . . meaning . . . at the time Congress enacted the statute.” When these two possible meanings differ, are there any circumstances where the existence of a longstanding interpretation, combined with decades of reliance upon this interpretation, outweigh the argument for strict adherence to ordinary meaning at the time of enactment? The Court has suggested different answers to this question over the past fifty years.

This Note proposes a three-part framework to assist in understanding how a “circuit consensus” may be considered as an indicator of meaning in federal statutory interpretation. A close examination of the words of the Justices, the institutional principles underlying the roles of the Court and Congress, and the values that support the orderly development of the law suggests that under certain circumstances, the Court should “let sleeping legal dogs lie.”

Keywords: statutory interpretation, textualism, dynamic statutory interpretation, contemporary meaning, reliance interests, rule of law, precedent, Supreme Court, federal courts