潔淨空氣，如何解釋？從Duke Energy（2007）與Massachusetts v. EPA（2007）論美國行政法中立法目的、行政解釋和司法審查之關係

Abstract

Since the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. (1984), theories of and debates over statutory interpretation has been blossoming in the past three decades. Step one of Chevron asks the reviewing court to decide whether Congress has expressed its choices through the language of statutes. Therefore, relentless efforts have been made to excavate meanings of statutory language. Textualism has its heyday in the 1980s and the 1990s since Justice Scalia was nominated to the bench. In the view of textualists, purposive interpretation resorting to legislative history gives judges leverage to exert their own preference over policies. A textualist's reading of statutes would conform to the doctrine of judicial deference mostly compatible with Chevron. However, the Supreme Court has gradually returned to the approach of legislative history in recent years through a series of decisions overruling the executive branch's overreaching or underreaching reading of statutes. This paper postulates this trend by analysis of two important environmental law cases, Duke Energy and Mass. v EPA. Clean Air Act is said to be the most complicated regulatory law in the United States. Considering the complexity of scientific knowledge and policy discretion in this area, the court rebutted the use of textualist interpretation of statutory language and detailed the history of legislative process to recover the purpose of the legislation. The resurgence of legislative history interpretation represents the court's changing of its view of separation of powers from the formal one to the structural and functional dynamics of powers.