Leviathan and Interpretive Revolution: The Administrative State, the Judiciary, and the Rise of Legislative History, 1890-1950

A generation ago, it was common and uncontroversial for federal judges to rely upon legislative history when interpreting a statute. But since the 1980s, the textualist movement, led by Justice Scalia, has urged the banishment of legislative history from the judicial system. The resulting debate between textualists and their opponents—a debate that has dominated statutory interpretation for a generation—cannot be truly understood unless we know how legislative history came to be such a common tool of interpretation to begin with. This question is not answered by the scholarly literature, which focuses on how reliance on legislative history became permissible as a matter of doctrine (in the Holy Trinity Church case in 1892), not on how it became normal, routine, and expected as a matter of judicial and lawyerly practice. The question of normalization is key, for legislative history has long been considered more difficult and costly to research than other interpretive sources. What kind of judge or lawyer would routinize the use of a source often considered intractable? Drawing upon new citation data and archival research, this Article reveals that judicial use of legislative history became routine quite suddenly, in about 1940. The key player in pushing legislative history on the judiciary was the newly expanded New Deal administrative state. By reason of its unprecedented manpower and its intimacy with Congress (which often meant congressmen depended on agency personnel to help draft bills and write legislative history), the administrative state was the first institution in American history capable of systematically researching and briefing legislative discourse and rendering it tractable and legible to judges on a wholesale basis. By embracing legislative history circa 1940, judges were taking up a source of which the bureaucracy was a privileged producer and user—a development integral to judges’ larger acceptance of agency-centered governance. Legislative history was, at least in its origin, a statist tool of interpretation. author. Associate Professor of Law, Yale Law School. For valuable conversations about the project, I thank Bruce Ackerman, Ian Ayres, James Q. Barrett, Joseph Blocher, James Brudney, Aaron-Andrew Bruhl, Josh Chafetz, Robert Ellickson, Daniel Ernst, William Eskridge, Heather Gerken, Abbe Gluck, Bob Gordon, Oona Hathaway, Daniel Ho, Christine Jolls, Dan Kahan, John Langbein, Robert Lieberman, Yair Listokin, John Manning, David Marcus, Jerry Mashaw, Tracey Meares, Thomas Merrill, Robert Post, Edward Purcell, Cristina Rodriguez, Susan RoseAckerman, Ted Ruger, Reuel Schiller, Alan Schwartz, Peter Strauss, Adrian Vermeule, Jim Whitman, and John Witt; and audiences for talks at Duke, Stanford, Yale, and the annual meeting of the American Society for Legal History. The quantitative aspect of the project was leviathan and interpretive revolution 267 made possible by the work of several excellent and dedicated research assistants: Allyson Bennett, Glenn Bridgman, Halley Epstein, Miles Farmer, Andrew Hammond, Tian Huang, Steven Kochevar, Stephen Petrany, Emily Rock, Clare Ryan, and Karun Tilak. For aid in obtaining sources, I thank the staffs of the Yale Law Library (particularly Sarah Kraus), the Harvard Law Library, the Columbia University Center for Oral History, the Library of Congress, the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, the Margaret I. King Library at the University of Kentucky, the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, and the National Archives; and Kim Dixon, Karen Needles, Doug Norwood, and Susan Strange. Glenn Bridgman generously shared data with me from his own research project. Alex Hemmer and his fellow members of the Yale Law Journal performed valuable work in editing and publishing the piece. I am grateful to Yale Law School for financial support. All errors are my own. All data produced for this project is available online at the Yale Law Journal’s website (http://www.yalelawjournal.org). the yale law journal 123:266 2013 268 article contents