Supreme Court deploys series-qualifier canon

Trial Notebook

By Steven P. Garmisa

Hoey & Farina

Posted June 3, 2021 11:05 AM

This is the first of a two-part column. The second part will appear Friday.Applying the series-qualifier canon of statutory interpretation — the notion that “when there is a straightforward, parallel construction that involves all nouns or verbs in a series,” a modifier at the end of the list “normally applies to the entire series,” Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts (2012) — the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Facebook didn’t violate the …

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