The Hidden Legacy of Holy Trinity Church: The Unique National Institution Canon

ABSTRACT This Article explores an underappreciated legacy of the Supreme Court's (in)famous decision in Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States. Although Holy Trinity has been much discussed in the academic literature and in judicial opinions, the discussion thus far has focused almost exclusively on the first half of the Court's opinion--which declares that the "spirit" of a statute should trump its "letter"--and relies on legislative history to help divine that spirit. Scholars and jurists have paid little, if any, attention to the opinion's lengthy second half. In that second half, the Court tells a detailed narrative about the country's historically Christian roots and explains that, other interpretive rules aside, the statute simply cannot be construed against the church because the United States "is a Christian nation." This Article maps the methodology of the Holy Trinity Court's Christian-nation argument and contends that that methodology constitutes an interpretive canon in its own right--one which perhaps aptly can be called the "unique national institution" canon. The Article goes on to demonstrate that this interpretative canon has reared its head in a number of statutory interpretation cases decided since Holy Trinity. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION I. HOLY TRINITY'S OTHER INTERPRETIVE PRECEDENT II. HOLY TRINITY'S UNIQUE NATIONAL INSTITUTION DESCENDANTS A. Flood v. Kuhn B. Leo Sheep v. United States C. FDA v. Brown & Williamson D. Morton v. Mancari III. THE UNIQUE NATIONAL INSTITUTION CANON IN CONTEXT A. "Canons" Unpacked B. Normative Considerations CONCLUSION INTRODUCTION In his dissenting opinion in Zuni Public School District No. 89 v. Department of Education, (1) Justice Scalia lamented that the majority's statutory analysis resurrected "Church of the Holy Trinity ... Phoenix-like, from the ashes." (2) He was referring, of course, to Holy Trinity Church v. United States, (3) an 1892 case that has become a titan in the field of statutory interpretation. At issue in Holy Trinity was the Alien Contract Labor Act of 1885, (4) which made it illegal for employers to pay the migration costs of aliens under contract to perform "labor or service of any kind" in the United States. (5) The government sought to apply the statute against a church that had paid the migration costs for an English clergyman under contract to become the church's rector. Relying in part on House and Senate committee reports, the Supreme Court famously declared that "a thing may be within the letter of the statute and yet not within the statute, because not within its spirit, nor within the intention of its makers." (6) The Court went on to conclude that the church's conduct was not prohibited because Congress intended for the statute to apply only to contracts to import manual laborers--not to contracts involving the importation of "brain toilers." (7) Holy Trinity is known, in the annals of statutory interpretation, as a turning point in the judicial use of internal legislative history (8) to trump a statute's clear text. (9) As Justice Scalia's Zuni dissent suggests, the case is a perennial target for textualists seeking to confine statutory interpretation to the text and nothing but the text (10) and, conversely, a beacon for intentionalists seeking to emphasize legislative purpose and intent as the touchstones of the interpretive process. (11) In accord with its contentious place in legal history, scholars and judges have spilt considerable ink analyzing Holy Trinity. Adrian Vermeule has argued that the Holy Trinity Court misread the relevant legislative history and suggested that the case should serve as a cautionary example of judicial incompetence accurately to decipher legislative history. (12) Carol Chomsky has argued that Holy Trinity was decided correctly when viewed in light of both the historical context within which the Alien Contract Labor Act was enacted and the jurisprudential context within which the Court rendered its decision. …