440
Syllabus
involving section 92's status. Though the parties did not lock horns over that issue, they did clash over whether the Comptroller properly relied on section 92 as authority for his ruling. A court properly presented with an issue is not limited to the particular legal theories advanced by the parties, but retains the independent power to identify and apply the proper construction of governing law, Kamen v. Kemper Financial Services, Inc., 500 U. S. 90, 99, even where that construction is that a law does not govern because it is not in force, cf. Cohens v. Virginia, 6 Wheat. 264, 405 (Marshall, C. J.). Nor did prudence oblige the court below to treat the unasserted argument that section 92 had been repealed as having been waived, since a court may consider an issue antecedent to and ultimately dispositive of the dispute before it, even if the parties fail to identify and brief the issue. Arcadia v. Ohio Power Co., 498 U. S. 73, 77. The court was asked to construe a statutory provision that the Code's keepers had suggested was no longer in force, on appeal from a District Court justifying its reliance on the law by the logic that, despite its "inadverten[t] repea[l]," section 92 remained in effect of its own force. After giving the parties ample opportunity to address the issue, the court acted without any impropriety in refusing to accept what in effect was a stipulation on the question of law as to section 92's validity. Pp. 445-448. 2. Section 92 was not repealed in 1918. Despite its omission from the Code, section 92 must remain on the books if the Statutes at Large, which provides "the legal evidence of laws" under 1 U. S. C. § 112, so dictates. Viewed in isolation, the deployment of certain quotation marks in the 1916 Act appears to support the argument, adopted by the Court of Appeals and pressed by respondents, that the Act places section 92 in Rev. Stat. § 5202, and that section 92 was subsequently repealed when the War Finance Corporation Act, ch. 45, 40 Stat. 506 (1918 Act), eliminated the relevant portion of § 5202. An examination of the structure, language, and subject matter of the relevant statutes, however, provides overwhelming evidence that, despite the placement of the quotation marks in question, the 1916 Act placed section 92 not in Rev. Stat. § 5202, but in § 13 of the Federal Reserve Act. Since the 1918 Act did not touch § 13, it did not affect, much less repeal, section 92. It would appear that the misplacement of the quotation marks in the 1916 Act was a simple scrivener's error by someone unfamiliar with the law's object and design. Courts should disregard punctuation, or repunctuate, if necessary to render the true meaning of a statute. Hammock v. Loan & Trust Co., 105 U. S. 77, 84-85. Pp. 448-463. 293 U. S. App. D. C. 403, 955 F. 2d 731, reversed and remanded.
Souter, J., delivered the opinion for a unanimous Court.
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