Cite as: 508 U. S. 439 (1993)
Opinion of the Court
1941). Over and over we have stressed that "[i]n expounding a statute, we must not be guided by a single sentence or member of a sentence, but look to the provisions of the whole law, and to its object and policy." United States v. Heirs of Boisdoré, 8 How. 113, 122 (1849) (quoted in more than a dozen cases, most recently Dole v. Steelworkers, 494 U. S. 26, 35 (1990)); see also King v. St. Vincent's Hospital, 502 U. S. 215, 221 (1991). No more than isolated words or sentences is punctuation alone a reliable guide for discovery of a statute's meaning. Statutory construction "is a holistic endeavor," United Savings Assn. of Texas v. Timbers of Inwood Forest Associates, Ltd., 484 U. S. 365, 371 (1988), and, at a minimum, must account for a statute's full text, language as well as punctuation, structure, and subject matter.
Here, though the deployment of quotation marks in the 1916 Act points in one direction, all of the other evidence from the statute points the other way. It points so certainly, in our view, as to allow only the conclusion that the punctuation marks were misplaced and that the 1916 Act put section 92 not in Rev. Stat. § 5202 but in § 13 of the Federal Reserve Act.7
The first thing to notice, we think, is the 1916 Act's structure. The Act begins by stating [t]hat the Act entitled
7 Contrary to respondents' argument, the Marshall Field doctrine does not preclude us from asking whether the statute means something other than what the punctuation dictates. The Marshall Field doctrine, indeed, is irrelevant to this case. In Marshall Field & Co. v. Clark, 143 U. S. 649, 672 (1892), the Court stated that a law consists of the "enrolled bill," signed in open session by the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate, see also 1 U. S. C. § 106, but there is no doubt in these cases that the 1916 Act as printed in the Statutes at Large is identical to the enrolled bill. The Marshall Field doctrine concerns " 'the nature of the evidence' the Court [may] consider in determining whether a bill had actually passed Congress," United States v. Munoz-Flores, 495 U. S. 385, 391, n. 4 (1990) (quoting Marshall Field, supra, at 670); it places no limits on the evidence a court may consider in determining the meaning of a bill that has passed Congress.
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