Court Opinion

ID: 9469317
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 02:37:25.219285+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:41:19.730516
License: Public Domain

NEWMAN, Circuit Judge,
concurring:
*286Whether or not to apply the literal terms of a statute is a choice that will be with us as long as legislators enact laws and judges construe them. There is no automatically “right” way to decide. In some circumstances, literalness is a faithful deference to the legislative branch, preferable to unrestrained judicial lawmaking. In other circumstances, it is a wooden approach, properly displaced by creative judicial interpretation. The characterizations may describe what we have done, but they do not aid in deciding when to do it.
In this case, all members of the panel agree that the literal terms of § 202 of the Packers and Stockyards Act, as amended in 1958, apply to a live poultry dealer’s activity with respect to poultry products. And no member of the panel contends that applying the statute literally would achieve a result plainly contrary to the evident Congressional purpose in enacting the 1958 amendments. That is to say, no one of us believes that Congress revised the statute in 1958 in order to make sure that live poultry dealers would not be subject to Department of Agriculture regulation with respect to poultry products. Thus, this is not the easy case where literalness should be rejected in order to avoid a result contrary to what the legislators sought to achieve.
Instead, this is a closer case in which a legislative intent to achieve one identifiable purpose may perhaps have been carried out by language unwittingly broader than necessary. By specifying a list of items in the introductory portion of § 202, Congress clearly intended to subject meat packers to Department of Agriculture regulation with respect to all items on the list, and to subject them to Federal Trade Commission jurisdiction with respect to any items not on the list. By making the list applicable to live poultry dealers, did Congress also intend to subject them to Department of Agriculture regulation with respect to all items on the list, including poultry products, or was such a result never contemplated? And, if never contemplated, would such a result have been rejected if it had occurred to the Congressional mind? I do not know, nor have I any especially firm basis for an educated guess.
I therefore examine the context in which the issue arises and note the following. The subject matter is business regulation. A formidable trade association, the National Broiler Council, can be expected to get the attention of the pertinent lawmakers if in fact Congress prefers not to regulate in the manner its chosen words specify. A literal application of the statute creates neither mischief nor a result that Congress manifestly would not have wanted if the prospect of such application had been considered. In these circumstances, I stay with the terms of the statute, especially when those terms were selected in an effort to resolve the very type of issue this case presents, the allocation of jurisdiction between two regulatory agencies.