By: Sam Heavenrich.
Much has been written about the substantive canons of statutory interpretation—policy-based interpretative guidelines and legal principles—and the purportedly recent vintage of some substantive canons, such as the major questions doctrine and the First Congress canon. Virtually ignored by academic commentators, however, are canons that courts once invoked with regularity but have since either implicitly or explicitly abandoned. This Article focuses on this understudied set of now-obsolescent rules of statutory interpretation: the canons, in other words, that have become decanonized. Far from mere historical curiosities, the decanonized canons help answer vital questions about statutory interpretation in general, and the fate of the substantive canons in particular: How do canons adapt over time? How does a canon become decanonized? And most importantly: once decanonized, can a canon ever be revived?