Justices Eye ‘Time Travel’ for Second-Guessing Predecessors (1)

The US Supreme Court weighed whether it should revisit how past justices decided congressional intent when interpreting statutes, during oral argument in a case challenging jurisdictional rules.

The debate has broad implications because the current Supreme Court is dominated by justices who deploy “textualism,” a method of statutory interpretation that prizes the text of a statute over other traditionally used tools like legislative history.

“Back in the bad old days where we had a statute to interpret, we looked at all sorts of stuff, you know, hearings, reports, testimony, all sorts of things, sometimes to the expense of the actual ...