Reject interpretations that make words redundant.
Scalia ’12 [Antonin Scalia and Bryan Garner; 2012; Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States; American lawyer, lexicographer, and teacher; Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts, “Surplusage Canon,” Ch. 26]
If possible, every word and every provision is to be given effect (verba cum effectu sunt accipienda1). None should be ignored. None should needlessly be given an interpretation that causes it to duplicate another provision or to have no consequence.
“These words cannot be meaningless, else they would not have been used.”
United States v. Butler,
297 U.S. 1, 65 (1936) (per Roberts, J.).
The surplusage canon holds that it is no more the court’s function to revise by subtraction than by addition. A provision that seems to the court unjust or unfortunate (creating the so-called casus male inclusus) must nonetheless be given effect. As Chief Justice John Marshall explained: “It would be dangerous in the extreme, to infer from extrinsic circumstances, that a case for which the words of an instrument expressly provide, shall be exempted from its operation.”2 Or in the words of Thomas M. Cooley: “[T]he courts must . . . lean in favor of a construction which will render every word operative, rather than one which may make some idle and nugatory.”3 This is true not just of legal texts but of all sensible writing: “Whenever a reading arbitrarily ignores linguistic components or inadequately accounts for them, the reading may be presumed improbable.”4