502
Souter, J., dissenting
legislative drafting are deliberate, an assumption we know to be false. See Posner, Statutory Interpretation—in the Classroom and in the Courtroom, 50 U. Chi. L. Rev. 800, 813 (1983); Radin, Statutory Interpretation, 43 Harv. L. Rev. 863, 873-874 (1930). As a result, "[s]cholars have long savaged the expressio canon," Cheney R. Co. v. ICC, 902 F. 2d 66, 68 (CADC 1990) (Williams, J.), at least when it is made to do the work of a conclusive presumption, and our decisions support the proposition that "[s]ometimes [the canon] applies and sometimes it does not, and whether it does or does not depends largely on context." R. Dickerson, Interpretation and Application of Statutes 47 (1975); see also id., at 234-235.
In this case, the "contemporary legal context," Cannon v. University of Chicago, 441 U. S., at 699, in which Congress drafted the ACCA requires rejecting the negative implication on which the Court relies. That context, as I have described, understood defendants to have a constitutional right to attack at sentencing prior convictions that had not previously been invalidated, and in that legal setting it would have been very odd for Congress to have intended to establish a constitutionally controversial rule by mere implication. See Lowe v. SEC, 472 U. S. 181, 206, n. 50 (1985) ("In areas where legislation might intrude on constitutional guarantees, we believe that Congress, which has always sworn to protect the Constitution, would err on the side of fundamental constitutional liberties when its legislation implicates those liberties") (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). And in fact the legislative history indicates that quite a different intention informed the addition to § 921(a)(20) in 1986, two years after the ACCA's enactment, of the exemption clause (and the related "choice-of-law clause," Beecham v. United States, ante, at 369. Congress simply intended to clarify that the law of the convicting jurisdiction should be the principal reference point in determining what counts as a "conviction" for purposes of the federal "felon in posses-
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