The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

NASA v. Nelson, 562 U.S. 134, 160 (2011) (Scalia, J., concurring in the judgment).

180 

Ibid.

, at 165.

181 

For example, in the 2014–15 term the Court disposed of 7,006 petitions for certiorari and grant-

ed certiorari to only seventy-one of those petitions. October Term 2014, J. S. Ct. II (June 30, 

2015), 

www.supremecourt.gov/orders/journal/jnl14.pdf

 [

https://perma.cc/5DWL-KRTW

].

182 

E.g., Richard A. Posner, “Statutory Interpretation – in the Classroom and in the Courtroom,” 

(1983) 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 800, 815–16.

183 

E.g., Gilbert Lee, “How Many Avoidance Canons Are There After Clark v. Martinez?,” (2007) 

10 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 193.

---

 

Soundings and Silences 

53

a famous concurring opinion by Justice Brandeis in Ashwander v. Tennessee 

Valley Authority.

184

 Refusing to address the claim that the entire TVA Act – a 

federal statute designed to promote rural electrification as part of FDR’s “first” 

New Deal – was unconstitutional, Justice Brandeis memorably articulated a 

set of considerations that he said ought to lead federal courts to avoid deciding 

difficult constitutional questions that might dispose of a case when it would 

be possible to decide the case on narrower grounds – grounds leaving those 

difficult questions unanswered at least for the time being.

185

There are more than a few occasions when the Court has all but tortured 

the words of a federal statute in order to avoid resolving a particularly perplex-

ing constitutional issue. One particularly egregious example involved Bond v. 

United States, a 2014 Supreme Court decision stemming from a US attorney’s 

seemingly bizarre and at the very least unwise decision to charge a woman 

with violating the law Congress had enacted to implement the Chemical 

Weapons Convention, even though all the distraught woman did was con-

spicuously spread toxic substances on the car, mailbox, and door knob of a 

rival for her husband’s affection in the hope that her rival would develop an 

uncomfortable rash.

186

 Although the terms of the law literally covered what the 

woman had done, the Court, in an opinion written by Chief Justice Roberts, 

managed to cobble together six justices to hold that, because of uncertainty 

about whether Congress really meant what it said as applied to circumstances 

like those presented in that case, respect for “basic principles of federalism” 

supported holding that the accused woman’s “local criminal activity” could 

not be punished under the Act to Implement the International Convention 

on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of 

Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction.

187

 The Court’s majority wrote 

that, just as it would have had a duty to interpret an ambiguous federal law 

so as to avoid difficult constitutional questions about the reach of the treaty 

power and of Congress’s power to implement a duly ratified treaty, so too it 

had a duty to find some way to hold even an unambiguous federal law inap-

plicable if holding it applicable in accord with its manifestly applicable terms 

would have made such avoidance impossible.

188

184 

297 U.S. 288, 346 (1936) (Brandeis, J., concurring; “The Court developed, for its own govern-

ance in the cases confessedly within its jurisdiction, a series of rules under which it has avoided 

passing upon a large part of all the constitutional questions pressed upon it for decision.”).

185