The Supreme Court's New Implied Repeal Doctrine: Expanding Judicial Power to Rewrite Legislation Under the Ballooning Conception of 'Plain Repugnancy'
This article presents a historical, public policy and analytical critique of the United States Supreme Court's revision of the implied repeal doctrine in Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC v. Billing, 551 U.S. 264, 127 S. Ct. 2383 (2007). The article takes a historical perspective to demonstrate the sound public policy rationale for the more traditional approach to this canon of statutory interpretation. The article analyzes the decision against the backdrop of more than 400 years of English and American courts traditional application of this doctrine to avoid judicial intrusion into the legislative prerogative. It is argued that the Court's revision of the implied repeal doctrine ignores the long and steady history of the doctrine; that the Court's new approach is bad law and bad policy; and that the Court should move to restore the traditional doctrine fully and clearly.
Continuity, Coherence, and the Canons
This article explores the tension posed to courts when undertaking statutory interpretation to balance on the one hand a creative role in improving law with, on the other hand, a guardian's role in preserving the law's continuity and predictability. For many scholars, the inherent challenges of the interpretive endeavor as well as a broad vision of the judiciary's role as engineer of legal reform dictate that courts should draw upon their creative role when construing statutes. Such scholars advocate in favor of a dynamic, updating, or preference-estimating and eliciting approach to statutory interpretation. But within the realm of modern statutory interpretation - that is, the interpretation of statutes not intended to delegate a broad lawmaking function to the courts - any emphasis on the role of courts as engineers of legal reform poses troubling ramifications for the other half of the equation - namely, the judiciary's role as guardian of the law's continuity and predictability. This paper explores the problems inherent in such approaches to the interpretive endeavor, with a particular focus on recent scholarship that aims to build more workable and disciplined dynamic framework. Ultimately, the paper contends that recent elaborations on dynamic theory highlight new problems with creative approaches to statutory interpretation. The paper argues instead that where courts are called upon to interpret ambiguous legislative mandates, they must elevate their guardian's role. Courts in turn best carry out this role by constructing and adhering to interpretive norms that build principled connections between interpretations over time.
Women's health in prison: urgent need for improvement in gender equity and social justice.
The needs of women held in detention have received little attention and con-tinue to be neglected by health systems and prison authorities. One reason for this, too readily accepted until now, is that women prisoners are a clear minor-ity group within prisons all over the world. It is only recently that attention has been drawn to the fact that a minor-ity status does not justify the widespread ignorance of women’s basic rights and the considerable gender insensitivity still dominating criminal justice systems.In Europe alone, there are about 100 000 women and girls in prison.