Canons, the Plenary Power Doctrine and Immigration Law

There is a fundamental dichotomy in immigration law. On one hand, courts have consistently maintained that Congress has “plenary power” over immigration and reject most constitutional challenges on that basis. On the other hand, courts frequently use canons of statutory construction in an aggressive fashion to help interpret immigration statutes in favor of aliens. Immigration scholars have almost exclusively focused on the plenary power doctrine. They have either ignored the important role that canons have played in immigration law or have viewed canons as serving only a temporary and marginally legitimate role as substitutes for the lack of constitutional rights afforded aliens. In this Article, I defend canons and argue that they should be viewed as having a permanent and legitimate role in interpreting immigration provisions, even in cases where no constitutional issues are raised. I explain that part of the function of some canons is to require courts to sometimes adopt second-best interpretations of statutes. Contrary to the claims of some scholars, these interpretations do not add unpredictability to the law. While I defend the canons that courts have chosen to apply in immigration cases on normative grounds, the Court’s recent application of the canon of constitutional avoidance presents new concerns. The Court has recently transformed the canon, which requires courts to avoid serious constitutional issues through statutory interpretations, into a device that often gives aliens as a whole greater rights, at least temporarily, than would a decision that rested on constitutional grounds. The expansion of the canon of constitutional avoidance means that courts should be particularly careful when applying it in order to avoid unnecessarily disrupting Congress’s legislative designs

Replacing the Flawed Chevron Standard

Judicial review of agency statutory interpretations depends heavily on the linguistic concept of ambiguity. Most significantly, under Chevron, judicial deference to an agency’s interpretation hinges on whether the court determines the statute to be ambiguous. Despite its importance, the ambiguity concept has been poorly developed by courts and deviates in important respects from how linguists approach ambiguity. For instance, courts conflate ambiguity identification and disambiguation and treat ambiguity as an umbrella concept that encompasses distinct forms of linguistic indeterminacy such as vagueness and generality. The resulting ambiguity standard is unpredictable and does not adequately perform its function of mediating between judicial interpretive autonomy and deference to agency interpretations. This Article offers a novel alternative to the problematic ambiguity concept. Rather than the current binary choice between clarity and ambiguity, different types of linguistic issues should call for different judicial treatment. Instead of the ambiguity trigger for deference, courts should presume that certain categories of issues are judicially resolvable while other categories are for the agency to resolve. The categories proposed in this Article reflect the traditional view that courts are experts at statutory interpretation (which includes determining congressional intent), and agencies are experts at policymaking (which includes exercising delegated discretion). The categories thus provide a framework for the allocation of interpretive authority between courts and agencies on the basis of their respective areas of expertise. Furthermore, the proposed framework offers a better account of significant cases, such as the famous King v. Burwell case where the Court refused to defer to the agency’s interpretation, than does the Court’s own explanations