Opinion ID: 1473555
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Expressio Unius

Text: One way of looking at the trial judge's analysis would be to say she focused exclusively on the language in § 16-302 that contemplates adoption by a married couple (spouse, husband and wife, marital status), and then applied, implicitly, the Latin maxim expressio unius est exclusio alterius: when a legislature makes express mention of one thing, the exclusion of others is implied. McCray v. McGee, 504 A.2d 1128, 1130 (D.C.1986) (statute permitting exception for counterclaims to Small Claims Branch jurisdictional limit understood to preclude exception for unmentioned cross-claims). [28] It is important to recognize, however, that reliance on any particular canon of statutory construction cannot be conclusive; indeed, for every canon, one can find an applicable countercanon. In re Kossow, 393 A.2d 97, 101 (D.C.1978) (citation omitted). In this case, for instance, since Congress did not expressly exclude adoptions by unmarried couples, the trial judge just as easily might have relied on the canon that says: statutory language may fairly be understood to comprehend many different cases when only some are expressly mentioned by way of example. [29] It is important to understand that canons of construction are not rules of substantive law, see Neuberger v. Commissioner of Internal Revenue, 311 U.S. 83, 88, 61 S.Ct. 97, 101, 85 L.Ed. 58 (1940); Matter of Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific R.R. Co., 658 F.2d 1149, 1158 (7th Cir. 1981)unless enacted as such, as was D.C.Code § 49-202. See supra note 6 and accompanying text. Nor is any particular canon easily identifiable as a tool of interpretation that assuredly applies to a particular statute. Karl Llewellyn once supplied a list of 28 instances where a proffered canon of construction could be neutralized effectively by another one. [30] In reality, therefore, when a court relies on a particular interpretive maxim such as expressio unius, the court is commonly electing between conflicting shorthand expressions to describe, after the fact, the court's particular rationale for deciding, for an assortment of reasons, what the statute means, having taken into account the statutory language and legislative history, the legislative scheme as a whole (including statutes that should be read together), and statutory purpose. Application of a canon of statutory construction, therefore, is actually a way of summarizingof explaininga decision otherwise made; it is not really a way of reaching a decision. [31] The question, then, is whether expressio unius describes a valid approach to discerning whether Congress in 1954 intended to include unmarried couples among the persons eligible to adopt children. The assumption underlying expressio unius is that, by reference to what the legislature said, the court can tell that the legislature thought about another matter and rejected it. In other words, this canon is shorthand for saying that the legislature said enough to imply it was covering the field, and thus that any omission within that field had to be intentional, not inadvertent. See McCray, 504 A.2d at 1130 (Congress, by failing to mention crossclaims in section 16-3904, must be presumed to have consciously excluded cross-claims from that section.) (emphasis added). This kind of reasoning has been applied in several common situations: when the statute specifies remedies, [32] itemizes exemptions [33] or deductions, [34] or creates exceptions [35]  classic examples of legislative action that, by its very nature, purports to be exclusive and thus clearly suggests the legislature has thought about the particular matter omitted. For three reasons the adoption statute does not present such a situation. First, in considering whether married couples are excluded as adopters, we are not dealing with typical expressio unius categories: specified remedies, exemptions, exceptions. Second, the statutory language itself does not clearly purport to specify all eligible adopters, given its level of generality (especially when compared with the 1895 statute) and its use of ifs when referring to married couples. Finally, and of considerable importance, there is no basis here for inferring that Congress even considered adoption by unmarried couples, let alone took a position on it. Both the statute and legislative history are silent on the subject. Nor is this a case where the legislature, in considering who should be allowed to adopt, necessarily would have considered unmarried couples. It might have done so, but did not assuredly do so. For that reason the very premise of expressio unius that the legislature considered and rejected a proposed possibility, see McCray, 504 A.2d at 1130is missing. See Adoption of Tammy, 619 N.E.2d at 319 (While the Legislature may not have envisioned adoption by same-sex partners, there is no indication that it attempted to define all possible categories of persons leading to adoptions in the best interests of children.) (footnote omitted). We therefore must conclude that the expressio unius rationale cannot be used to explain the omission of unmarried couple adopters from § 16-302, and thus it cannot be applied to justify the exclusion of unmarried couples from eligibility to adopt.