2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Perm / Theory › Perm › AT: Perm do Both---2NC
Jesse M. Cross & Abbe R. Gluck 20, Cross is Assistant Professor, University of South Carolina Law School; Gluck is Professor of Law and Faculty Director, Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy, Yale Law School, “The Congressional Bureaucracy,” 168 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1541, May 2020, WestLaw
For example, OLRC may insert what it calls a “no source” provision into a new positive title that it is preparing for Congress. A “no source” provision is one that did not exist in any congressionally enacted law, but that OLRC creates out of whole cloth.620 For example, if OLRC concludes that a new defined term will help it more easily articulate the policies that it is assembling in the title, it may insert a new definition into the title, and then use this newly defined term throughout the title.621 In the chapter of title 46 labeled “Liability of Water Carriers,” for example, the very concept of a “carrier” is a *1665 defined term added by OLRC in a “no source” provision (the term that indicates OLRC created it).622 While the Revision Notes flag those provisions as having no source, those notes are hard to find and do not appear in the main text--whereas the “no source” provisions themselves do appear in the main text of the Code unflagged, just like provisions that Congress actually had enacted in prior law. “In a positive law codification bill,” an interviewee reported, “we create these definition sections pretty frequently.”623
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Perm / Theory › Theory › AT: Theory---Long---2NC
Jarrod Shobe 20, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “Codification and the Hidden Work of Congress,” 67 UCLA L. Rev. 640, July 2020, WestLaw
Where does law go after Congress enacts it, but before courts interpret it and the public reads it? This seemingly simple question is in fact very complicated, without a single, predictable answer. This Article provides the first in-depth scholarly examination of the process by which enacted laws are organized and presented for public consumption, known as codification, a process that has mostly escaped the notice of judges and scholars of legislation, and is not explained in textbooks meant to introduce lawyers to the creation and interpretation of law. It argues that the failure to account for this process has left gaps in our understanding of what law is and how it should be interpreted.
Law often undergoes significant change between enactment and the time it is organized within the U.S. Code, which is a compilation of Congress's individual enactments. The decision of how to organize these individual enactments within the Code, or whether to leave them out of the Code altogether, is made by a nonpartisan group of lawyers within Congress known as the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. These technical organizers have significant power over how (and in some cases, whether) courts, litigants, and the public see an enacted law, although their power differs depending on the type of Code title. This Article's descriptive and normative claims have real-world application because organization and context are central to interpretation, but interpreters have failed to grapple with how codification affects organization and context. This Article argues that interpreters must understand the full complexity of how law is organized and presented before they can make confident pronouncements about congressional bargains and legislative intent. Understanding the codification process provides a more accurate, albeit more complicated, path forward for statutory interpretation.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Funding
Larry Kramer 91, Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School, ““The One-Eyed are Kings”: Improving Congress's Ability to Regulate the Use of Judicial Resources,” 54-SUM Law & Contemp. Probs. 73, Summer 1991, WestLaw
This idea is not new. Justice (then Chief Judge) Cardozo proposed creating a “Ministry of Justice” to review judicial decisions in 1921, attributing the idea to earlier writings by Roscoe Pound and Jeremy Bentham.82 Cardozo's proposal was part of a broader movement that led to the establishment in most states of judicial conferences and in many states of law revision commissions.83 The former are typically responsible for running the state's judicial bureaucracy and for updating its rules of procedure and evidence. The latter more closely approximate the kind of entity I am proposing for the federal system in that state law revision commissions are usually responsible for examining laws and judicial decisions and making recommendations for reform to the legislature.
Experience with state law revision commissions has generally been good, and several states, particularly New York and California, have had notable success.84 The New York Law Revision Commission was responsible for that state's adoption of the Uniform Commercial Code (“UCC”),85 which helped create momentum for the UCC's nationwide acceptance. The California commission produced an evidence code that has been the basis for practically all subsequent reform in the field.86 In addition to such large projects, both the New York and California Law Revision Commissions have made many less *93 prominent, but still useful, recommendations. Through 1984, 163 of 185 recommendations made by the California Law Revision Commission had been adopted in whole or in part by the state's legislature.87 In its first twenty-three years, the New York Law Revision Commission submitted 315 recommendations dealing with 245 subjects, of which 181 were enacted.88 These successes have led other commentators—among them judges, legislators, and executive officials—to recommend creating a law revision commission for the federal government.89
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Expertise
Richard J. Wood 17, Professor of Law, Capital University School of Law, “Family Tax Law: Improving the Organization of the Internal Revenue Code by Creating a Subdivision on Family Tax Law,” 35 Quinnipiac L. Rev. 243, 2017, WestLaw
IV. IMPLEMENTATION OF A FAMILY TAX LAW SUBDIVISION OF THE CODE
As discussed above, the last reorganization of the Internal Revenue Code occurred under President Ronald Reagan in 1986.145 It was meant *281 to be a comprehensive overhaul of the entire body of American Income taxation.146 Prior to the 1986 overhaul, the Internal Revenue Code of 1954 replaced the Internal Revenue Code of 1939.147 In the thirty years since the last reorganization of the Code, family law has emerged as a discrete area of legal specialization. As mentioned above, there is currently a political will to address family law issues in the context of federal tax reform.148 Implementation of the proposal to create a family tax law subdivision will require identification of existing sections of the Code that should be included within the subdivision. This article has identified those sections. Next, it will be necessary to determine where in the Code to place the subdivision. This includes placing the subdivision at the appropriate level of the existing organization. The subdivision may be a subchapter, part, or subpart of the Code. This will require knowledge about both family law and the organizational structure of the entire Internal Revenue Code.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Delay
Jarrod Shobe 20, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “Codification and the Hidden Work of Congress,” 67 UCLA L. Rev. 640, July 2020, WestLaw
On the other hand, positive law titles reflect Congress's decisions about both the content and organization of the law because those titles are voted on in Code form. Before a title of the Code is voted into positive law, it benefits from a long process of revision and amendment, with input from interested agencies, congressional committees, and outside parties before being put to a congressional vote. This process identifies “obsolete, ambiguous, or inconsistent provisions”8 and then strives to fix them by improving the Code's organization and wording.9 While positive law codification improves the organization and coherence of law, it is not without problems. Once a title is enacted into positive law, any future amendments must be made by Congress directly to the Code. This imposes on Congress the burden of maintaining the organization of the Code going forward, a burden that Congress has not always shown itself to be able to bear well. Congress must specifically amend the exact places it wants to change, which is no small task when Congress is in a rush or more concerned with enacting a law for *646 political purposes than precisely amending existing law.10 If Congress does not accurately amend a positive law title, then OLRC's only option is to put the enacted text into a note of the relevant title, which sometimes results in entire bills being relegated to positive law notes. Despite its flaws, positive law codification certainly better reflects Congress's work than nonpositive law, and the flaws can generally be attributed directly to Congress, rather than to OLRC.
Congress could address many of the issues with codification this Article identifies by accelerating its use of positive law. As this Article shows, positive law codification is a slow process, and in most years many more pages are added to nonpositive law titles than positive law ones.11 Congress could reverse this trend by choosing to enact more titles into positive law. Although this would increase the burden on Congress, Congress could remedy this by allowing OLRC to be involved in the organizational aspects of drafting laws. As it currently stands, OLRC's work begins only after enactment, and so their expertise in the Code does not carry over to the drafting of legislation, which is left to Congress's professional drafters and other groups who are less expert in the codification process. These types of codification changes would address many of the main issues of codification by reducing OLRC's discretion to affect the substance of the law while still allowing their technical expertise to inform the creation and organization of the law.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Authority
Anita S. Krishnakumar 21, Mary C. Daly Professor of Law, St. John's University School of Law, “Cracking the Whole Code Rule,” 96 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 76, April 2021, WestLaw
Some might wonder what is so bad about letting judges create a common law of statutory drafting conventions and word meanings. After all, our legal system is, at bottom, a common-law system, and judges have long been in charge of establishing common-law definitions for legal concepts such as “fraud,” “negligence,” and the like. Indeed, Black's Law Dictionary derives many of its definitions from caselaw.241 This is a counterargument that is more appealing at first blush than upon closer inspection. The problem with letting judges dictate one-size-fits-all definitions for terms used in statutes--as opposed to letting them establish definitions for legal concepts like “fraud” that courts themselves created through the incremental lawmaking process that is the common law--is that judges are not the drafters, or originators, of statutory words and phrases. Congress is. And Congress, unlike common-law judges, enacts individual statutes to address specific social problems; it does not engage in incremental rulemaking or carefully seek to harmonize new statutes with older ones already on the books. Moreover, Congress's drafting choices are political--often taken from proposals provided by interest groups242--and are influenced by the need for political compromise and coalition building. So when judges insist, without any legislative-record support, that two statutes enacted under different political conditions should be presumed to use specific words and phrases consistently, they are not being “faithful agents” of the legislatures that drafted those statutes. Rather, they are imposing the distinctly judicial goals of coherence, elegance, and logical consistency onto a political product that is messy, chaotic, and full of often-contradictory compromises.
Notably, judges who externally impose coherence across disparate statutes are behaving inconsistently with textualists' own repeated exhortations that each statute's text is the product of a finely *142 wrought political compromise: Textualists often emphasize this point in arguing that interpreters should attend carefully to each statute's precise wording rather than its overall purpose, on the theory that the statute's final words are the result of political bargains and reflect “a decision to go so far and no farther.”243 But if this is so--if the precise wording of each statute reflects a delicate political compromise following a messy “legislative battle among interest groups, Congress, and the President”244--then that suggests not only that interpreters should “hew closely to the semantic meaning”245 of the enacted text, but also that the bar should be very high for gauging similarity between different statutes enacted after different legislative battles producing different political compromises.246
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Authority
Jarrod Shobe 19, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “Enacted Legislative Findings and Purposes,” 86 U. Chi. L. Rev. 669, May 2019, WestLaw
In other ways, however, enacted findings and purposes are different from other statutory language. For example, they are drafted by political staff who are much more closely connected to members of Congress than nonpartisan drafters from Congress's Offices of Legislative Counsel, who often draft the more technical provisions of statutes.8 In fact, Legislative Counsel explicitly discourage the inclusion of findings and purposes in bills, advising Congress that those materials are best left to committee reports.9 Despite this admonition, Congress continues to frequently include them in statutes. Findings and purposes are prominently placed at the beginning of statutes and are written in plain language that is intelligible to members of Congress and their high-level staffs, and so they may be the statutory language that members of Congress and their high-level staffs are most likely to read. Members of Congress generally engage with legislation at a relatively high level of abstraction, and it may be that enacted findings and purposes, rather than the much more voluminous *673 unenacted legislative history, best reflect members' understanding of why a bill was drafted and what it was meant to accomplish.
Another notable difference between findings and purposes and other statutory text is in the way they are codified. Although findings and purposes are valid law published in the Statutes at Large, which contain the law as passed by Congress and signed by the president,10 it is common practice for a bill to be stripped of its findings and purposes before the rest of the statute is placed in the main text of the US Code.11 Findings and purposes most commonly end up in notes to the Code, where they can be difficult to locate and identify as enacted text because they are often placed far from much of the rest of a bill's text and often appear similar to other unenacted editor's notes. Even more surprisingly, findings and purposes are sometimes left out of the Code altogether.12 The decision of where to put findings and purposes in the Code, or whether to leave them out altogether, is made by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel (OLRC), an unelected body within Congress that is responsible for the codification process. These technical organizers of the Code have significant power over how (and in some cases, whether) courts, litigants, and the public see the law, but their role has gone unnoticed by scholars and judges. It is peculiar, to say the least, that this office regularly hides away in notes some of the most salient text that Congress *674 enacts, and does so in ways that are inconsistent and based on institutional practice that is not accessible to outsiders. This codification process is a potential explanation for the scant attention enacted findings and purposes have received from courts and scholars.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › OLRC › AT: OLRC Fails---AT: Authority
Kristen David Adams 7, Professor of Law, Stetson University College of Law, “The American Law Institute: Justice Cardozo's Ministry of Justice?,” 32 S. Ill. U. L.J. 173, Fall 2007, WestLaw
Along the same lines, Professor Eric Gouvin's proposal shared some similar features with the recommendations propounded by some of the other writers previously discussed, but ultimately pursued a more ambitious agenda than the others. Justice Ginsburg, Professor Kramer, and Professor Eric Gouvin each noted that the Office of the Law Revision Counsel for the United States House of Representatives has the “paper” authority to serve as the kind of law revision committee that Justice Cardozo envisioned, but has never done so.155 [FOOTNOTE 155 BEGINS] Ginsburg, supra note 108, at 1432; Kramer, supra note 16, at 78-79 (“[W]hile this body's statutory mandate is broad enough to permit it to serve a planning function, lack of resources has limited it to the strictly ministerial task of keeping the United States Code up to date.”); Eric J. Gouvin, Truth in Savings and the Failure of Legislative Methodology, 62 U. Cin. L. Rev. 1281, 1370 (1994) (“Although on paper the Office of Law Revision Counsel's powers sound impressive, its modest staffing, limited compensation levels, and lack of participation by members of Congress translates into limited prospects for meaningful revision of federal statutes as a practical matter.”). [FOOTNOTE 155 ENDS] All three writers described this phenomenon as a significant lost opportunity.156 [FOOTNOTE 156 BEGINS] Ginsburg, supra note 108, at 1432; Kramer, supra note 16, at 79 (“As a result, Congress gives little systematic consideration to the impact of new legislation on the federal courts. What planning takes place is done haphazardly in committee, and on those occasions when serious consideration is given to structuring federal jurisdiction, questions of efficiency are seldom in the foreground.”); Gouvin, supra note 155, at 1370 (“By invigorating the Office, the judiciary's task of deciphering legislation might be made easier and the quality of the legislative product may improve.”). [FOOTNOTE 156 ENDS] Gouvin noted that political realities may prevent the Office from effectuating change, even if it were granted the power to do so.157 *193 Notably, however, the kind of changes Professor Gouvin imagined this office undertaking seemed to go beyond the “noncontroversial” and “housekeeping” functions that Justice Ginsburg and Professor Kramer suggested would fall within the jurisdiction of a law revision commission, making Professor Gouvin's proposal arguably more consistent with Justice Cardozo's vision and the American Law Institute model than the more limited proposals are.158
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---AT: Not Binding
Geoffrey K. Barnes et al. 15, Geoffrey K. Barnes, J. Van Carson, Wendlene M. Lavey, John D. Lazzaretti, Robert D. Cheren, Squire Patton Boggs (US) LLP, “Reply Brief of Petitioner,” In re Murray Energy Corporation, Petitioner. Murray Energy Corporation, Petitioner, v. United States Environmental Protection Agency and Regina A. McCarthy, Administrator, United States Environmental Protection Agency, Respondents, 2015 WL 831942, WestLaw
EPA argues that the Office's determination of the text of Section 111(d) presented in the United States Code is entitled to no deference, see EPA Br. 46-49, refusing to acknowledge that Congress provided that the contents of the Code “establish prima facie the laws of the United States.” 1 U.S.C. § 204(a). Instead of offering any interpretation of this statutory provision, EPA relies on a footnote in United States v. Welden, 377 U.S. 95 (1964), for the remarkable proposition that the Code “is entitled to ‘no weight.’ ” Id. at 99 n.4. EPA neglects to mention that the Welden footnote dealt only with the “change of arrangement” of statutes and merely applied the rule that even when Congress changes the arrangement of statutes, “it will not be inferred that Congress ... intended to change their effect unless such intention is clearly expressed.” Id. (quotation omitted).
EPA also states that “the text in the Statutes at Large controls” over the Code when “there [is] a substantive difference between the two.” EPA Br. 47. Instead of identifying any “substantive difference,” EPA relies upon a failed conforming amendment that the Office correctly determined could not be executed because it did not have priority over an earlier substantive amendment in the same bill. EPA refers to the Section 302(a) conforming amendment as “unexecuted text” and demands that it be “considered and given effect.” EPA Br. 48 n.23. But it has been “considered” by the Office and found to have no effect because it did not have execution priority. Given that a *15 separate provision in the same bill deletes the text it would amend, there is no effect for it to have. Even if it had priority over the earlier substantive Section 108(g) amendment, the result would be the same: After Section 302(a) conformed the cross-reference, the cross-reference would then be deleted by Section 108(g) and replaced with the language that is in the Code. Thus, the text of Section 111(d) in the Code is exactly the same as it would be if the two amendments were executed in reverse order.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---AT: Courts Key
John Copeland Nagle 96, Associate Professor, Seton Hall University School of Law. B.A., Indiana University, 1982; J.D., University of Michigan Law School, 1986, “Corrections Day,” 43 UCLA L. Rev. 1267, April 1996, WestLaw
Judge Friendly expanded on Cardozo's proposal forty years later.94 Friendly objected to statutes that displaced the courts yet contained mistakes that the legislature failed to correct. These mistakes included statutory language that conflicted with likely legislative intent and ambiguous *1292 and vague statutes where there was no real controversy within the legislature about the appropriate clarification.95 Friendly listed seven reasons why the legislature was better positioned to correct statutory mistakes than the courts,96 and he sharply criticized Congress for not making the correction of such mistakes a higher priority.97 But Friendly found Cardozo's notion of a “Ministry of Justice” to smack of an executive department, whereas to Friendly “[i]t would seem elementary that an agency whose task is to formulate legislation and secure its enactment should be attached to the legislature.”98 Friendly envisioned a committee examining all Supreme Court and federal court of appeals decisions, addressing only noncontroversial matters (at least until it had established itself), and supporting rather than supplanting existing congressional committees by doing the work that had been left undone.99
Justice Ginsburg picked up where Friendly left off.100 She, too, focused on statutory mistakes involving noncontroversial issues that Congress tried but failed to resolve when it enacted unintentionally ambiguous *1293 statutory language.101 Ginsburg also agreed that Congress should do the correcting, and she recommended that Congress should “assign[ ] to designated members responsibility to hear judicial pleas for a clear statement of ‘what [Congress] meant (or in any event what it means now).’ ”102 She suggested two bodies that could solicit examples of statutory mistakes and advise concerning possible corrections from all interested parties.103 [FOOTNOTE 103 BEGINS] Ginsburg suggested that the House's Office of the Law Revision Counsel could emphasize statutory clarification. Alternately, Congress could create a new committee to review cases interpreting statutes and to draft proposed statutory amendments if necessary. Id. at 1016 (citing Letter from Justice Stevens to Rep. Kastenmeier (Oct. 25, 1983), reprinted in A Bill to Establish an Intercircuit Panel, and for Other Purposes: Hearings on S. 704 Before the Subcomm. on Courts of the Senate Comm. on the Judiciary, 99th Cong., 1st Sess. 34-36 (1985)). Ginsburg offered several options regarding the placement and composition of the committee, including separate committees in the House and the Senate, a joint subcommittee of the Judiciary Committees of both chambers, or a committee like that advocated by Judge Friendly that contained members from outside Congress as well. Id. at 1016-17. [FOOTNOTE 103 ENDS]
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Perception
Will Tress 10, Assistant Professor and Law Library Director, University of Baltimore School of Law. J.D., University of Maryland School of Law, 1984 (cum laude); M.L.S., Columbia University, 1974; M.A., New York University, 1973; B.A., Columbia College, 1967, “Lost Laws: What We Can't Find in the United States Code,” 40 Golden Gate U. L. Rev. 129, Winter 2010, WestLaw
The problem of uncodified temporary laws is most acute with those laws that are made temporary by a presumption: the appropriations riders. Except in those cases where there are clear indicia of permanence, or alternatively, where there is clear limiting language,107 the temporary or permanent nature *154 of a rider is once again a matter of judgment.108 There are, of course, constraints to the exercise of that judgment: “The Office of the Law Revision Counsel selects the statutes that meet the statutory requirements for inclusion in the Code.”109 Those statutory requirements, however, are fairly broad. The statute that makes the Code prima facie evidence of the law also states that the statutes in the Code are “general and permanent in their nature.”110
The criteria for permanence can be in dispute. Charles Zinn, Law Revision Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in the 1950's, stated that “if [an] appropriation bill repeats a particular provision in identical language year after year it is inserted in the Code on the grounds that Congress intends the provision to be permanent.”111 But a U.S. Attorney General's opinion issued at about the same time suggested that successive enactments raised the presumption that the measure was not permanent.112
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Certainty---Referral---ext
Robert A. Katzmann & Russel R. Wheeler 7, Katzmann is Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit; Wheeler is President, the Governance Institute, “A Mechanism for “Statutory Housekeeping”: Appellate Courts Working With Congress,” 9 J. App. Prac. & Process 131, Spring 2007, WestLaw
This year the bipartisan leadership of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees called for the United States Courts of Appeals' widespread participation in a decades-old project to let Congress know about possible technical flaws in statutes.1 Its chief purpose is not to promote remedial legislation but rather to provide legislators and their bill-drafting staffs information about how appellate courts interpret the legislative product. The project is noteworthy as an approach to the long-standing search for practical ways of alerting Congress to drafting problems in judicial opinions and as an example of legislative-judicial cooperation and communication.
I. Some Background
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Certainty---Referral---ext
Robert A. Katzmann 12, Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, “Statutes,” 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 637, June 2012, WestLaw
Over the years, several proposals have been made to facilitate statutory revision.232 Justice Ginsburg and her coauthor Peter Huber recommended that a “second look at laws” committee be created, and that the Office of Law Revision Counsel, which has had a ministerial role of correcting citations, assist in “statutory housekeeping.”233 Judge Frank M. Coffin urged that a unit within the judiciary collate and sift judicial opinions with suggestions for the legislative branch and send them to Congress.234 Then-Chief Judge James L. Oakes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit seconded the proposal.235 Judge Wilfred Feinberg called for the Judicial Conference to “designate a handful of law professors working on a part-time basis as *687 a committee to call attention to . . . conflicts [among the circuits].”236 Justice John Paul Stevens suggested that Congress create a legislative mechanism to resolve intercircuit conflicts.237
These thoughts have a distinguished lineage. In 1921, Benjamin Cardozo, then an associate judge on the New York Court of Appeals, drawing upon Roscoe Pound and Jeremy Bentham, recommended the creation of ministries of justice to facilitate law revision.238 In the early 1960s, Judge Friendly stated that “[i]t would seem elementary that an agency whose task is to [help] formulate legislation . . . should be attached to the legislature.”239
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Certainty---Ext
Michael J. Lynch 97, received a JD from the University of Michigan. He is Director of the Law Library at John Marshall Law School, Atlanta. GA, “The U.S. Code, the Statutes at Large, and Some Peculiarities of Codification,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1, 10/03/1997, pp. 69–84
For most lawyers the United States Code is the source for statutory authority. If they think about it, which they rarely do, they realize that the law is also found in the Statutes at Large. Inconvenience arises from two aspects of the Statutes at Large. Later amendments or repeals cannot be noted with the original enactment, nor can the original enactment be repeated each time amendments are published. These are among the reasons why codes have proved useful. Nevertheless, not all laws presently in force, even though “general and permanent”’ are included in the Code. Some samples of these omissions will be given. Furthermore, there remain some instances in which the Statutes at Large have a binding effect despite differing language in an enacted title of the Code. These instances are few enough that it is unlikely that anyone would anticipate them; but the examples given may disappoint lovers of certainty and the United States Code.
BRIEF HISTORY OF FEDERAL CODIFICATION
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Certainty---AT: Confusion/Clarity
Peter G. LeFevre 13, Law Revision Counsel, 2004-2011, “The United States Code: Its Accuracy, Accessibility, and Currency,” 38-WTR Admin. & Reg. L. News 10, Winter 2013, WestLaw
As I was watching the debate about the Obama Administration's landmark healthcare legislation a few years ago, I got a big laugh out of one incident I saw. A Member of Congress made the mistake of admitting in public that he had not read the whole bill, and people jumped all over him. How could he vote for a bill he hadn't even read? After that it seemed like every Member had read the bill--all 2,700 pages of it.
Take out a copy of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Pub. L. No. 111-148) and try to read it. Let's see, here's something interesting on page 265: “Title XXVII of the Public Health Service Act ... is amended in section 2704 ... as so redesignated by section 1201(2)-(A) in subsection (c)-(i) in paragraph (2), by striking ‘group health plan’ each place that such term appears and inserting ‘group or individual health plan.”’ Or what about this on page 283: “Section 1920(e) of such Act ..., as added by section 2001(a)(4)(B) and amended by section 2001(e)(2)(C), is amended by inserting ‘, clause (i)(IX),’ after ‘clause (i)(VIII).”’ The Affordable Care Act contains page after page of provisions like this, and after you get to title X of the law on page 883, start reading more carefully because you don't want to miss all those amendments that go back and make changes in titles I to IX.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---Certainty---Circuit Splits
Robert A. Katzmann & Stephanie M. Herseth 97, Katzmann is President, the Governance Institute, Walsh Professor of Government, Professor of Law and Professor of Public Policy, Georgetown University, and Visiting Fellow, the Brookings Institution; Herseth is Ph.D candidate, Department of Government, Georgetown University, J.D. Georgetown University Law Center, 1997; B.A., Georgetown University, 1993, “An Experiment in Statutory Communication Between Courts and Congress: A Progress Report,” 85 Geo. L.J. 2189, July 1997, WestLaw
Congress should be very interested in the statutory decisions of courts. Court opinions can significantly shape the meaning of legislation. More fundamentally, they can identify drafting problems that the legislative branch may want to address. In the context of statutory revision, a variety of proposals have been advanced for ways in which courts might more effectively communicate their criticisms and suggestions to legislatures.3 [FOOTNOTE 3 BEGINS] For an excellent review of such mechanisms, especially in the states, see Shirley S. Abrahmson & Robert L. Hughes, Shall We Dance? Steps for Legislators and Judges in Statutory Interpretation, 75 MINN.L.REV. 1045, 1059-81 (1991) (discussing mechanisms for legislative monitoring of judicial opinions that interpret statutes). Then Circuit Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her coauthor Peter Huber have suggested that a “second look at laws” committee be created, and that the Office of Law Revision Counsel be upgraded to assist in “statutory housekeeping.” Ruth Bader Ginsburg & Peter W. Huber, The Intercircuit Committee, 100 HARV.L.REV. 1417, 1421 (1987). In addition, Judge Frank M. Coffin has recommended that an entity within the judiciary collate judicial opinions with suggestions for the legislative branch and send them to the Hill, an idea supported by then Chief Judge James L. Oakes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Interview with Judge Frank M. Coffin, THIRD BRANCH, June 1982, at 1, 3-7; James. L. Oakes, Grace Notes on ‘Grace Under Pressure,’ 50 OHIO ST. L.J. 701, 714-15 (1989). Judge Wilfred Feinberg has urged the Judicial Conference to “designate a handful of law professors working on a part-time basis as a committee to call attention to ... conflicts [among the circuits].” Wilfred Feinberg, A National Court of Appeals?, 42 BROOK.L.REV. 611, 627 (1976). Justice John Paul Stevens has also pressed for some mechanism so that Congress could resolve intercircuit conflicts. John R. Stevens, Some Thoughts on Judicial Restraint, 66 JUDICATURE 177, 183 (1982) (examining efficiency and appropriateness of congressional role in resolution of intercircuit conflicts in matters of statutory interpretation). These ideas have historical precedents. In 1921, Justice Benjamin Cardozo, borrowing from Roscoe Pound and Jeremy Bentham, recommended the creation of a Ministry of Justice to facilitate law revision. Benjamin N. Cardozo, A Ministry of Justice, 35 HARV.L.REV. 113, 114 (1921) (citing Roscoe Pound, Juristic Problems of National Progress, 22 AM.J. SOC'Y 721, 729-31 (1917) and THE WORKS OF BENTHAM 597-612 (John Bowring ed., Simpkin Marshall 1843)); see also Larry Kramer, “The One-Eyed are Kings”: Improving Congress's Ability to Regulate the Use of Judicial Resources, 54 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 73, 90-97 (1991). In the 1960s, Judge Henry Friendly commented that it “would seem elementary that an agency whose task is to [help] formulate legislation ... should be attached to the legislature.” Henry J. Friendly, The Gap in Lawmaking—Judges Who Can't and Legislatures Who Won't, in BENCHMARKS 62 (Henry J. Friendly ed., 1967). [FOOTNOTE 3 ENDS]
*2190 Four years ago, The Georgetown Law Journal provided a forum to discuss a proposed experiment in “statutory housekeeping,” as then Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg aptly phrased it.4 That experiment took the form of pilot project of the Governance Institute5 and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. It sought to develop routinized means for courts to transmit opinions to Congress—opinions that have interpreted particular statutes and have identified problems for legislative consideration. The project was concerned with congressional unawareness of many such cases and was committed to the view that improved communication between the branches would improve the work of both branches.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Solvency › US Code › Solvency---2NC
Jarrod Shobe 20, Associate Professor of Law, J. Reuben Clark Law School, Brigham Young University, “Codification and the Hidden Work of Congress,” 67 UCLA L. Rev. 640, July 2020, WestLaw
Law often undergoes significant change between enactment and the time it is organized within the U.S. Code, which is a compilation of Congress's individual enactments. The decision of how to organize these individual enactments within the Code, or whether to leave them out of the Code altogether, is made by a nonpartisan group of lawyers within Congress known as the Office of the Law Revision Counsel. These technical organizers have significant power over how (and in some cases, whether) courts, litigants, and the public see an enacted law, although their power differs depending on the type of Code title. This Article's descriptive and normative claims have real-world application because organization and context are central to interpretation, but interpreters have failed to grapple with how codification affects organization and context. This Article argues that interpreters must understand the full complexity of how law is organized and presented before they can make confident pronouncements about congressional bargains and legislative intent. Understanding the codification process provides a more accurate, albeit more complicated, path forward for statutory interpretation.
INTRODUCTION
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Top › 1NC › OFF
Gro Harlem Brundtland 20, first woman Prime Minister of Norway and former Director-General of the World Health Organization; leading advocate on global preparedness for pandemics; put sustainable development on the international agenda, “Nationalism and partisan politics make it harder to tackle the existential threats to humanity,” The Elders, 5/14/20, https://theelders.org/news/nationalism-and-partisan-politics-make-it-harder-tackle-existential-threats-humanity
The strange new reality of Covid-19 is forcing huge changes on all of us, some of which may become permanent features of how we live, work and organise our societies.
We are all being called upon to become more flexible, more adept with technology and more collaborative across borders and time zones.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Other Random Cards › Neg---AT: Employment Adv › 1NC---AT: Jobs = Output Boom
Albertini et al. 12 – University of Every; Reserve Bank of New Zealand; Reserve Bank of New Zealand
Julien Albertini, Güneş Kamber, and Michael Kirker, “Estimated Small Open Economy Model With Frictional Unemployment,” Pacific Economic Review, Vol. 17, Iss. 2, Pg. 326-353, 5-17-12, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0106.2012.00585.x
Therefore, the model is unable to generate an internal propagation mechanism from shocks affecting the rest of the economy to the labour market variables. We can see this disconnect between the labour market part and the rest of the model in Figure 9, which presents the variance decomposition of output. In accordance with our argument, shocks to the labour market variables contribute only marginally to the fluctuations in output.
2023
Georgetown
Counterplan
Other Random Cards › Aff---AT: Econ DA › 1AR---Inequality T/ Econ
BIS 21 – Bank for International Settlements
“2021 Annual Economic Report,” Bank for International Settlements, June 2021, https://www.bis.org/publ/arpdf/ar2021e.pdf
While recessions tend to increase inequality, inequality, in turn, can intensify the depth and duration of recessions. As a result, recessions and inequality can reinforce each other over business cycle fluctuations. Aggregate demand shortfalls during downturns appear to be larger when the income distribution is more polarised, ie when the top earners account for a larger share of total income at the expense of the bottom earners. As noted above, low-income workers are typically the first to be laid off and hence see their incomes disproportionately curtailed. As much evidence confirms, the propensity to consume is higher for households with low income. Hence, if those at the bottom of the distribution lose their income in a downturn, a sharper contraction in aggregate consumption follows.