The Enacted Purposes Canon

AuthorKevin M. Stack
PositionLee S. & Charles A. Speir Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School
Pages283-339
283
The Enacted Purposes Canon
Kevin M. Stack*
ABSTRACT: This Article argues that the principle relied upon in King v.
Burwell that courts “cannot interpret statutes to negate their stated
purposes”—the enacted purposes canon—is and should be viewed as a
bedrock element of statutory interpretation. The Supreme Court has relied
upon this principle for decades, but it has done so in ways that do not call
attention to this interpretive choice. As a result, the scope and patterns of the
Court’s reliance are easy to miss. After reconstructing the Court’s practice, this
Article defends this principle of interpretation on analytic, normative, and
pragmatic grounds. Building on jurisprudence showing that when a rule
states its own justification the meaning of the rule changes, this Article argues
that enacted purposes change the range of permissible readings of a statute.
The Article also argues that the enacted purposes canon has beneficial
consequences because it requires courts to prioritize the most public-regarding
elements of legislation. The canon, moreover, represents a point of agreement
between textualist and purposivist approaches to statutory interpretation.
Based on the Court’s long reliance and positive justification, it is time to
acknowledge the enacted purposes canon.
Recognition of the enacted purposes canon matters to administrative law and
legislation. The enacted purposes canon applies in review of administrative
agency action to prevent agencies from adopting interpretations inconsistent
with their statutes’ enacted purposes—an implication with particular
importance when the president’s policies are in tension with some of the
enacted purposes in legislation. This analysis also exposes how conventional
guidance on legislative drafting misses the critical feature of enacted purpose
provisions: the way they entrench policy. Finally, and most importantly,
attention to enacted purposes serves as a reminder that our federal legislation
is a messy accumulation of individual statutes, with their own purposes, not
a formal code.
*
Lee S. & Charles A. Speir Professor of Law, Vanderbilt Law School. I am gratef ul to
Richard Bierschbach, Tara Grove, Anita Krishnakumar, Margaret Lemos, Dan Meagher, Nina
Mendelson, Max Minzner, Alex Reinert, Ganesh Sitaraman, as well as to workshop participants
at St. John’s Law School and Deakin University Law School, Australia, for comments on early
versions of this paper. In addition, I benefited from excellent research assistance from Erin
Fredrick Conklin, Calvin Cohen, Walter Perry, and Mark Williams.
284 IOWA LAW REVIEW [Vol. 105:283
I.INTRODUCTION ............................................................................. 285
II. ENACTED PURPOSE PROVISIONS ................................................... 289
III.JUDICIAL RELIANCE ON ENACTED PURPOSES ................................ 291
A.ORIGINS IN PREAMBLES ........................................................... 292
B.RISE OF RELIANCE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ...................... 294
C.CONTEMPORARY EXAMPLES ..................................................... 299
D.SUMMARY AND QUALIFICATIONS .............................................. 304
IV.DEFENDING RELIANCE ON ENACTED PURPOSES ............................ 304
A.STATUTES WITH ENACTED PURPOSES ARE DIFFERENT ................ 305
B.CONGRESSIONAL PRACTICE ...................................................... 308
C.ENACTED PURPOSES AND PUBLIC-REGARDING
INTERPRETATION .................................................................... 310
D.AGREEMENT BETWEEN TEXTUALISTS AND PURPOSIVISTS ............ 313
V.THE ENACTED PURPOSES CANON ................................................. 316
A.LABELS ................................................................................... 317
B.SUBSTANCE ............................................................................. 319
C.IS IT DEFEATED BY THE SPECIFIC GOVERNS THE
GENERAL”? ....................................................................... 321
VI.BEYOND JUDICIAL STATUTORY INTERPRETATION.......................... 323
A.CHEVRON AND ENACTED PURPOSES ......................................... 323
B.ENACTED PURPOSES, THE U.S. CODE, AND STATUTORY
CULTURE ................................................................................ 328
C.CONGRESS AND STATUTORY DESIGN ......................................... 331
VII. CONCLUSION ................................................................................ 333
APPENDIX A .................................................................................. 334
POSITIVE TITLES ..................................................................... 334
NONPOSITIVE TITLES ............................................................... 335
APPENDIX B ................................................................................... 337
POSITIVE TITLES ..................................................................... 337
NONPOSITIVE TITLES ............................................................... 338
2019] THE ENACTED PURPOSES CANON 285
I. INTRODUCTION
“We cannot interpret federal statutes to negate their own stated
purposes.”1 The Supreme Court relied on this principle in King v. Burwell2
after a careful recitation of the Affordable Care Act’s (“ACA(’s)”) enacted
aims and policies.3 This Article’s core argument is that this principle—which
I call the enacted purposes canon—is and should be viewed as a bedrock
principle of statutory interpretation.
Many federal statutes include an enacted statement of the statute’s
purpose. These enacted purposes are part of the enacted text of the statute
—they follow the statute’s enacting clause,4 often at the beginning of the
statute under a separate heading or combined with findings or statements of
policy. Like statutory definitions, enacted purposes purport to speak to the
entire statute.
For decades, the Supreme Court has relied upon enacted purposes in
statutory interpretation but has done so without calling attention to its
practice as an interpretive choice.5 As a result, each instance is easy to miss,
and the overall patterns of reliance are even harder to see. Reconstructing the
Court’s practice reveals that it has long relied on enacted purposes to exclude
interpretations inconsistent with those purposes. In a sense, there already is
an enacted purposes canon; the Court just has not expressly identified it as
such. Moreover, the enacted purposes principle has strong justifications. At
the most basic level, the enactment of a statement of purpose changes the
range of permitted meanings of a statute; as part of the enacted text, these
provisions exclude interpretations inconsistent with them, just as the
adoption of a rationale for a rule excludes applications of the rule
inconsistent with that rationale. Because Congress generally adopts broad
purposes provisions even when it accommodates special interests in other
parts of the legislation, interpreting statutes in light of their enacted purposes
excludes some private-regarding interpretations in favor of more public-
regarding constructions. In addition, the canon has the pragmatic virtue of
being a point of common ground between textualist and purposivist
approaches to statutory interpretation. On the one hand, it satisfies
textualism’s core commitment to privileging the enacted text.6 These
1. King v. Burwell, 135 S. Ct. 2480, 2493 (2015) (quoting N.Y. State Dep’t of Soc. Servs. v.
Dublino, 413 U.S. 405, 419–20 (1973)).
2. Id. at 2493.
3. See id. at 2486–87; see also infra text accompanying notes 115–31 and 138–42 (discussing
King’s reliance on enacted aims and policies).
4. 1 U.S.C. § 101 (2012) (“The enacting clause of all Acts of Congress shall be in the
following form: ‘Be it enacted by the Senate and House of R epresentatives of the United States
of America in Congress assembled.’”).
5. See infra Part III.
6. John F. Manning, What Divides Textualists From Purposivists?, 106 COLUM. L. REV. 70, 75
(2006) [hereinafter Manning, What Divides?] (noting that textualists seek to understand how a

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