Has to be measured relatively to the status quo ante---can’t just make it “expansive” in a vacuum
Victoria F. Nourse 11, Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law, University of Wisconsin, “HOW MUCH WORK DOES LANGUAGE DO?: Two Kinds of Plain Meaning,” Spring 2011, 76 Brooklyn L. Rev. 997, Lexis
Is plain meaning so plain? This is not meant to be a philosophical question, but one deserving serious legal analysis. The plain-meaning rule claims to provide certainty and narrow statutes' domains. As a relative claim, comparing plain meaning with purposivism, I agree. But I do not agree that plain-meaning analysis is as easy as its proponents suggest. In this piece, I tease out two very different ideas of plain meaning-ordinary/popular meaning and expansive/legalist meaning-suggesting that doctrinal analysis requires more than plain-meaning simpliciter. Perhaps more importantly, I argue that plain meaning, as legalist meaning, can quite easily expand a statute's scope, relative to a baseline of ordinary meaning or the status quo ex ante.