"I think the Supreme Court took a fairly clear statute and read it wrong," he said.
Bouie, stemming from a lunch counter "sit-in" at the height of the civil rights movement, held that the South Carolina Supreme Court' s construction of its trespass laws -- criminalizing conduct not covered by the text of an otherwise clear statute -- was "unforeseeable" and thus violated due process when applied retroactively to the petitioners.
Lacking a clear federal statute, the courts have been unable to reach a consensus.
"Our scoping paper lays a substantial foundation for a clear, modern statute providing a coherent scheme of structured, clearly defined offences that can be readily understood and efficiently prosecuted.
But diGenova argued there is no clear statute or constitutional provision that would prevent the indictment of the president.
The dissent found the clear statute of limitations in 286 coupled with Petrella overcame what it characterized as weak evidence of a common law rule which allowed latches as a legal defense in patent infringement cases.
It is not certain that an agency regulation determining the pre-emptive effect of any federal statute is entitled to deference, cf. Smiley v. Citibank (South Dakota), N.A., slip op. at 8, but one pertaining to the clear statute at issue here is surely not.
Perhaps the Congress might this time be able to craft the statute with some clarity, but even a clear honest services statute will enable Washington to impose local standards that, in our federal system of divided government, should be left for New Yorkers to decide.
You'd think there would be very clear statutes concerning gambling.
Second-generation textualism argues that lawmaking inevitably involves compromise; that compromise sometimes requires splitting the difference; and that courts risk upsetting a complex bargain among legislative stakeholders if judges rewrite a clear but messy statute to make it more congruent with some asserted background purpose.
By focusing on cases that have neither a clear answer under the statute nor important policy constraints, the book unveils the decision-making process of the Justices themselves – what they do when they are left to their own devices.
