Statutory interpretation by SCOTUS

Seamless web time again. On SCOTUSblog,  Steven Schwinn reviews the Supreme Court's opinions in Reynolds v. U.S., No. 106549 (Jan. 23, 2012) in "Opinion analysis: An exercise in statutory construction". The case arises in a criminal law context—sex offender registration—but it is an APA case.

In the end, Reynolds is, and maybe always was, just a narrow case about statutory construction in a rather obscure corner of the SORNA, coming to the Court merely to resolve a deep circuit split.

That obscure corner deals with the Act’s application to sex offenders who were convicted before the Act’s adoption, the so-called “pre-Act” offenders.  The Act says that the Attorney General “shall have the authority to specify the applicability of the [registration] requirements” to pre-Act offenders – that is, to say whether pre-Act offenders had to register just like post-Act offenders. ... In short, the parties disagreed about whether the phrase “to specify the applicability of” operated against a baseline that required pre-Act offenders to register, or one that didn’t.

The majority opinion (all except Scalia and Ginsburg) actually included legislative history as well as the statutory language to find that the AG had to activate the requirement against pre-Act offenders. Scalia's dissent argued the language of the statute meant that it was effective against pre-Act offenders on its terms and the AG could exempt them. Scalia thinks the language is clear when seven fairly bright people think it means something different. EMM