Statutory cases

Although at first glance cases that require the justices to interpret statutes might seem simpler, the statutory side of the Court's docket presents many of the same challenges and has provoked similar disputes over basic principles of interpretation.

If a statute was perfectly clear, chances are that it would not be the subject of a Supreme Court case. But it is the rare statute that by its own terms answers every question that might arise. Perhaps Congress failed to anticipate the full range of situations in which the statute might be invoked. Or, quite often, the task of addressing all the possible applications of a bill under consideration exceeds the legislative appetite for detail or requires one compromise too many. Congress is then quite happy to let the courts fill in the blanks. After all, unlike a constitutional ruling, a ruling on the meaning of a statute can be overturned by new legislation if Congress concludes that the courts have come up with the wrong answer.

The Americans with Disabilities Act provides a vivid example. Since its enactment in 1990, this major civil rights law, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability, has been the subject of dozens of court decisions, including several major Supreme Court rulings. The law's prohibitions are, for the most part, clear, but what is a disability? Congress provided only a spare definition:“(A) a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more of the major life activities; (B) a record of such an impairment; or (C) being regarded as having such an impairment.”The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with administering the law, in turn issued a regulation defining “major life activities” to include “functions such as caring for oneself, performing manual tasks, walking, seeing, hearing, speaking, breathing, learning, and working.”

A question arose quickly: what if someone had a condition that met one of the definitions but that could be mitigated by medication or by a medical device? Did the person still have a disability within the meaning of the law? Which counted, the corrected state or the uncorrected state? The statute and the regulations were silent. Two women with poor but completely correctable eyesight brought a lawsuit under the act after they were turned down for jobs as airline pilots. They argued that since they had been denied employment on the basis of their eyesight, they should be considered disabled and protected against employment discrimination. The Supreme Court found otherwise in Sutton v. United Airlines (1999), noting that with glasses, the women were not limited in any major life activity. Congress intended to limit the law's coverage “to only those whose impairments are not mitigated by corrective measures,” the Court concluded. A man whose high blood pressure was controlled by medication was fired from his job as a commercial truck driver when the employer learned of his hypertension diagnosis. He sued, arguing that the law protected him. In Murphy v. United Parcel Service (1999), the Supreme Court rejected the claim, on the same ground: when medicated, the truck driver was not limited in a major life activity. Finally, confronted with a tide of individual claims, the Court attempted a more general clarification. In Toyota Motor Mfg. v. Williams (2002), the justices rejected the claim of a woman who was unable to continue in her assembly-line job because carpal-tunnel syndrome limited her ability to perform the required manual tasks. The Court held that “the central inquiry must be whether the claimant is unable to perform the variety of tasks central to most people's daily lives, not whether the claimant is unable to perform the tasks associated with her specific job.”

It is worth noting that the first two decisions were not unanimous. Two justices, Stevens and Breyer, objected in dissent, in the case of the nearsighted pilots, that the Court had reached the “counterintuitive conclusion” that the law's “safeguards vanish when individuals make themselves more employable by ascertaining ways to overcome their physical or mental limitations. Observing that the Americans with Disabilities Act was designed to redress a common cause of discrimination, the two justices said that rather than read the law narrowly, the Court should follow “a familiar canon of statutory construction that remedial legislation should be construed broadly to effectuate its purposes.”

The disability cases thus illustrate conflicting approaches to the task of statutory interpretation: one, an effort to fit the case at hand to the statute's precise words, and the other, an effort to step back and interpret the statute in light of the congressional purpose in enacting it. To ascertain purpose often requires reference to the statute's legislative history—to the floor debates, the records of committee hearings, committee reports, and the final reports of the Senate and House of Representatives. For the disability act, as the dissenters pointed out, these materials made it clear that whether a person had a disability was to be determined based on the person's uncorrected state; a person with hearing loss, for example, was to be deemed limited in the major life activity of hearing without regard to whether hearing aids could correct the problem.

Justice Breyer has argued that courts, as “partners in the enterprise,” should use the materials at hand to help Congress carry out its legislative purposes. Justice Scalia, by contrast, refuses to cite legislative history at all, due to what he considers its unreliability and “manipulability” by congressional staff members. Rather than guess at an underlying purpose, he argues, courts should simply hold Congress to the precise language that it enacts into law. Other justices consider legislative history to be an informative tool at least some of the time.