Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/19pdf/17-1618_hfci.pdf
Page Number: 40.0

Cite as:  590 U. S. ____ (2020) 

3 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

discrimination because of “sex” still means what it has al-
ways meant.  But the Court is not deterred by these consti-
tutional niceties.  Usurping the constitutional authority of
the other branches, the Court has essentially taken  H. R. 
5’s  provision  on  employment  discrimination  and  issued  it 
under the guise of statutory interpretation.4  A more brazen 
abuse of our authority to interpret statutes is hard to recall.
The Court tries to convince readers that it is merely en-
forcing  the  terms  of  the  statute,  but  that  is  preposterous. 
Even as understood today, the concept of discrimination be-
cause  of  “sex”  is  different  from  discrimination  because  of 
“sexual orientation” or “gender identity.”  And in any event,
our duty is to interpret statutory terms to “mean what they
conveyed  to  reasonable  people  at  the  time  they  were  writ-
ten.”  A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpreta-
tion  of  Legal  Texts  16  (2012)  (emphasis  added).  If  every
single living American had been surveyed in 1964, it would 
have been hard to find any who thought that discrimination 
because of sex meant discrimination because of sexual ori-
entation––not  to  mention  gender  identity,  a  concept  that 
was essentially unknown at the time. 

The Court attempts to pass off its decision as the inevita-
ble product of the textualist school of statutory interpreta-
tion championed by our late colleague Justice Scalia, but no
one should be fooled.  The Court’s opinion is like a pirate 
ship.  It sails under a textualist flag, but what it actually
represents is a theory of statutory interpretation that Jus-
tice Scalia excoriated––the theory that courts should “up-
date” old statutes so that they better reflect the current val-
ues of society.  See A. Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 22 

—————— 

4 Section 7(b) of H. R. 5 strikes the term “sex” in 42 U. S. C. §2000e–2
and  inserts:  “SEX  (INCLUDING  SEXUAL  ORIENTATION  AND
GENDER IDENTITY).”