The Anti-Messiness Principle in Statutory Interpretation

Many of the Supreme Court\u27s statutory interpretation opinions reflect a juisprudential aversion to interpreting statutes in a manner that will prove messy for implementing courts to administer. Yet the practice of construing statutes to avoid messiness has gone largely unnoticed in the statutory interpretation literature. This Article seeks to illuminate the Court\u27s use of anti-messiness arguments to interpret statutes and to bring theoretical attention to the principle of messiness avoidance. The Article begins by defining the concept of anti-messiness and providing a typology of common anti-messiness arguments used by the Supreme Court. It then considers some dangers inherent in the Court\u27s use of anti-messiness arguments to reject otherwise plausible statutory constructions. Last, the Article explores how the anti-messiness principle fits within existing theories of jurisprudence and statutory interpretation and discusses how attentiveness to anti-messiness might add greater texture to prominent theories of statutory interpretation