It's All About Interpretation (6/4/20)

I have written often on statutory interpretation (including subsets related to deference to agency interpretation).  Statutory interpretation is a related topic to constitutional interpretation.  For example, originalism has its principal application to constitutional interpretation, but the originalist interpretive strategy can apply equally to statutory interpretation.  And, interpretation applies equally to biblical interpretation.  As my favorite Hebrew Bible scholar, James Kugel, says, it is all about interpretation.  Kugel says that it is not about what the original author(s) (or redactors in the current lingo) meant, it is how it is interpreted at the critical moment in time – in the case of the Bible when the Jewish community decided that the text was canonical for them (long after, in most cases, it was written (or finally redacted)).  (His principal anecdote proving his point is the Hebrew Bible book Song of Songs (Song of Solomon in the Christian New Testament).  That process of going from original writing through the redaction and community adoption process took a long time, often hundreds of years.  And then, once canonical, it is about how the community of faith interprets it over time to meet the community needs.  (Great midrash about how the text can expand or change in interpretation over time, a process that can equally apply with constitutional and statutory interpretation.)

There was no (or little) lapse of time between writing and adoption of the constitution and statutes, where the two are roughly contemporaneous (although both get reinterpreted over the years to meet the needs of the community).  At any rate, I thought this offering, here, from John Sexton, a prominent legal scholar and force of nature, talking about his seminar at NYU might be interesting to readers of this blog.  The reading list for Sexton's course is here,

Disclosure:  I am a long-time Brooklyn Dodgers fan.  And a long-time John Sexton fan (he interviews John Sexton).  And when those two flow together in an interview with Bill Moyers to talk about the confluence of baseball, particularly baseball through the Brooklyn Dodgers, and religion, particularly with sacred texts such as the Bible and the Constitution, well that is irresistible .

This comes up as I am considering offering a course at my Church on Sexton's book, Baseball as a Road to God, here.

BTW, it strikes me that there is a further parallel at least for statutory interpretation.  The analog with Chevron deference is that the religious community, in whatever form, often "defers" to interpretations offered by their rabbis, priests, pastors, shamans or whatever, rather than making its own individual interpretations de novo (as a lawyer would say) or sola scriptura as Martin Luther might say.  The analog is imperfect, but, I think, worth considering.