Calling on U.S. Courts to Adopt Canada’s Unified Approach to Statutory Interpretation

The courts in the U.S. have been divided between the “new textualist” and “purposive” approaches to statutory interpretation, though currently the new textualist approach appears to dominate. The purpose of this paper is to encourage U.S. courts to consider adopting the “unified textual, contextual and purposive approach to statutory interpretation” (also referred to as the “words-in-total-contexts approach”), as it was developed by the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) in recent years.