Yesterday Justice Gorsuch issued the Court's opinion in New Prime Inc v. Oliveira, which he authored for a unanimous SCOTUS. The decision gives an interesting glimpse into his textualist style of legal analysis, which is reminiscent of (and in my opinion, even a further development of) the textual style of his predecessor and former boss, Justice Scalia.
Yesterday Justice Gorsuch issued the Court's opinion in New Prime Inc v. Oliveira, which he authored for a unanimous SCOTUS. The decision gives an interesting glimpse into his textualist style of legal analysis, which is reminiscent of (and in my opinion, even a further development of) the textual style of his predecessor and former boss, Justice Scalia.
For the purpose of this article, I'll focus on the only significant issue in the case: Are independent contractors covered under the Federal Arbitration Act's exemption for “contracts of employment of seamen, railroad employees, or any other class of workers engaged in foreign or interstate commerce"?
PLAIN MEANING CANON
In approaching this question, Justice Gorsuch invoked the plain meaning canon of statutory construction as follows:
[I]t’s a ‘fundamental canon of statutory construction’ that words generally should be ‘interpreted as taking their ordinary . . . meaning . . . at the time Congress enacted the statute.’” Wisconsin Central Ltd. v. United States, 585 U. S. ___, ___ (2018) (slip op., at 9) (quoting Perrin v. United States, 444 U. S. 37, 42 (1979)
Justice Gorsuch then acknowledged the plain meaning "employment" as it would be understood by lawyers today:
CURRENT PLAIN MEANING
"To many lawyerly ears today, the term “contracts of employment” might call to mind only agreements between employers and employees (or what the common law sometimes called masters and servants)."
… As well as current dictionary definitions of the term:
"Suggestively, at least one recently published law dictionary defines the word 'employment' to mean 'the relationship between master and servant.' Black’s Law Dictionary 641 (10th ed. 2014)."
Justice Gorsuch then turned his analysis to the meaning of the term at the time of the Federal Arbitration Act's adoption in 1925:
PLAIN MEANING IN 1925
"But this modern intuition isn’t easily squared with evidence of the term’s meaning at the time of the Act’s adoption in 1925. At that time, a 'contract of employment' usually meant nothing more than an agreement to perform work. As a result, most people then would have understood §1 [of the Federal Arbitration Act] to exclude not only agreements between employers and employees but also agreements that require independent contractors to perform work."
