Words and Worlds: The Supreme Court in Rapanos and Carabell
By Jonathan Z. Cannon
INTRODUCTION
Rapanos v. United States and Carabell v. United States Army Corps of Engineers (collectively Rapanos), decided together in June 2006, are the third time in twenty-one years that the Supreme Court has addressed the jurisdictional scope of the federal Clean Water Act (CWA). This essay interprets the decision from a cultural perspective, as another chapter in the struggle for institutional recognition of environmentalists' beliefs and values. In particular, it explores the competition between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist worldviews, and their associated values, that is evident in three of the five opinions in Rapanos. This competition has figured prominently in a number of the Court's most significant environmental cases in the modern environmental era, and in Rapanos reaches a kind of equipoise.
This essay attends to the Justices' differing approaches to statutory interpretation in Rapanos, including their use of text, purpose, and interpretive rules. It argues that these divergent interpretational methods are themselves informed by values that are either congruent with environmentalism or opposed to it. In this analysis, a Justice's affinity for the environmentalist worldview or its antithesis follows from the values implicit in his or her judicial philosophy. Justice Scalia is antagonistic to environmentalism for at least some of the same reasons he is a textualist; Justice Stevens is receptive to environmentalism for some of the same reasons he is an intentionalist; and Justice Kennedy, not identified with the extremes on either of these dimensions (textualist/intentionalist or pro-/anti-environmentalist), navigates the middle.
Rapanos v. United States and Carabell v. United States Army Corps of Engineers (collectively Rapanos), decided together in June 2006, are the third time in twenty-one years that the Supreme Court has addressed the jurisdictional scope of the federal Clean Water Act (CWA). This essay interprets the decision from a cultural perspective, as another chapter in the struggle for institutional recognition of environmentalists' beliefs and values. In particular, it explores the competition between environmentalist and anti-environmentalist worldviews, and their associated values, that is evident in three of the five opinions in Rapanos. This competition has figured prominently in a number of the Court's most significant environmental cases in the modern environmental era, and in Rapanos reaches a kind of equipoise.
This essay attends to the Justices' differing approaches to statutory interpretation in Rapanos, including their use of text, purpose, and interpretive rules. It argues that these divergent interpretational methods are themselves informed by values that are either congruent with environmentalism or opposed to it. In this analysis, a Justice's affinity for the environmentalist worldview or its antithesis follows from the values implicit in his or her judicial philosophy. Justice Scalia is antagonistic to environmentalism for at least some of the same reasons he is a textualist; Justice Stevens is receptive to environmentalism for some of the same reasons he is an intentionalist; and Justice Kennedy, not identified with the extremes on either of these dimensions (textualist/intentionalist or pro-/anti-environmentalist), navigates the middle.