| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Legislative Deferrals: Statutory Ambiguity, Judicial Power, and American Democracy. By George I. Lovell. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xxii, 290 pp. $65.00, ISBN 0-521-82415-X.)
George I. Lovell situates his book at the intersection of legal history, political science, and statutory interpretation. It explores the phenomenon of deliberate statutory ambiguity, using a sequence of case studies of federal labor statutes—chiefly the Erdman, Clayton, and Norris-LaGuardia Acts—passed from 1898 to 1935. The book makes large claims about how all three fields have ignored this phenomenon and how addressing it changes the fields. The book offers some genuine insights but also illustrates some pitfalls of interdisciplinary work.	1
The deliberate ambiguity that Lovell calls "legislative deferral" is different from the interpretive uncertainty that can result when a law is applied to facts and problems unforeseen by the lawmakers; here, the facts have been foreseen, but the lawmakers have decided to punt the hard policy-making questions to the courts. It is obvious why this happens: lawmakers must please conflicting constituencies, and ambiguity provides resources for doing so; legislative enactment requires coalitions, and members have divergent goals (each thinking her preferred goal may prevail in court); and so on. What is not obvious is why legal historians, political scientists, and law scholars would have all ignored this phenomenon or created theoretical frameworks that fail to account for it.	. . .

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