Justice Thomas stands up for the little guy

Recently, the Supreme Court decided the case of Pacific v. Valladolid.  It is a decidedly unsexy case, and its ruling did not provoke any headlines in the New York Times. The unsexy issue: whether the Longshore and Harbor Worker's Compensation Act extends to an employee who died on land rather than at sea, if the death had a "substantial nexus" to his work at sea. According to the Supreme Court, it does.

Why is this bloggable?

First, the opinion was unanimous.  There was no ideological split, though Alito and Scalia did file a separate opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment.

Second, the case came up from the Ninth Circuit, which the Supreme Court famously likes to smack down.  And the Ninth Circuit's opinion was in conflict with two other circuits which had decided the issue, so it may have seemed ripe for a smackin'.

Third, the losing party in this case was Big Oil, which (along with all other big businesses) the Supreme Court supposedly kowtows to.

Fourth, the majority opinion, written by Justice Thomas, uses textual analysis to reach a result that favors the little guy—in this case a manual laborer whose job was known in the trade as a "roustabout."  This would seem to refute the argument that textualism is just a smokescreen that judges use to get the results that they subjectively prefer.  (For another example, see this prior post.)

In other words, this case should make you question your cynicism.

Scalia stands up for the little guy

Today the Supreme Court decided a statutory interpretation case involving bankruptcy law that turns more or less on the meaning of the word "applicable."  Sexy, sexy stuff.  At the risk of boring our reader(s), let me briefly explain the issue: whether an individual in bankruptcy can deduct from his disposable income—that is, the amount he's presumed to have available to pay creditors -- an amount for the ownership costs of his car, even if he owns his car outright and has no car payments.

In Justice Kagen's first published opinion, the pro-business Roberts Court predictably sided with the creditor—a big, bad credit card company—by interpreting the Bankruptcy Code to more or less incorporate an IRS regulation that makes clear that taxpayers may not take a deduction for ownership costs unless they have car payments to make. 

Only one Justice had the courage to stand up and dissent on behalf of the poor debtor:  Justice Scalia.  He interpreted "applicable" so that simply owning a car would qualify the debtor to deduct the specified amount from his or her disposable income.  To the charge that his interpretation rendered the word "applicable" superfluous, Scalia responded, "The canon against superfluity is not a canon against verbosity."  Just another example of a judge using the canons of statutory interpretation to get his preferred result.

Of course I'm being facetious.  I don't think this is evidence that Scalia cares about the little guy, particularly, or that either he or Kagen were perverting the canons to get their "preferred result. " But just remember this case the next time you read a story about how the Supreme Court always decides "business cases" in favor of businesses.  I posit that most of them are just like this one—statutory interpretation cases that come down to judicial idiosyncrasy—not judicial ideology.