Breyer, in his book Making Our Democracy Work: “[A] statute’s language may be vague, and the scope of its coverage may be uncertain. But it does not help us understand a vague statement to pretend that someone else ‘in ordinary life’ made the statement. How often would it help us understand, say, a difficult point in a university lecture to pretend that the lecturer is not a lecturer but a journalist? Similarly, how often does it help us to understand a statute’s vague or ambiguous language to pretend that its congressional authors were engaged in any activity other than the one they were engaged in, namely, writing a statute?”
Scalia, concurring in Conroy v. Aniskoff: “I confess that I have not personally investigated the entire legislative history . . . . The excerpts I have examined and quoted were unearthed by a hapless law clerk to whom I assigned the task. The other Justices have, in the aggregate, many more law clerks than I, and it is quite possible that if they all were unleashed upon this enterprise they would discover . . . many faces friendly to the Court’s holding. Whether they would or not makes no difference to me — and evidently makes no difference to the Court, which gives lipservice to legislative history but does not trouble to set forth and discuss the foregoing material that others found so persuasive. In my view, that is as it should be, except for the lipservice. The language of the statute is entirely clear, and if that is not what Congress meant then Congress has made a mistake and Congress will have to correct it.”
With respect to entertainment, consider, for example, this exchange during the November 8 oral argument in Costco v. Omega, a case involving questions about the proper interpretation of section 602 of the Copyright Act:
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