Philosophical Views of the Judiciary’s Role and Common Interpretive Problems

I. Introduction

Statutes have become the primary building blocks of the modern American legal system. Some legal scholars call this phenomenon the statutorification of American law. But political processes and legislative compromises often result in statutes that are ambiguous, broadly worded, or otherwise unclear. Twentieth-century Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter defined a statute as, quote, “an instrument of government partaking of its practical purposes, but also of its infirmities...