clear statement rule
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 404 U.S. 336 - United States v. Bass · 1971Most cited · 3,812 citing opinions
federal-state balance
unless Congress conveys its purpose clearly, it will not be deemed to have significantly changed the federal-state balance. In traditionally sensitive areas, such as legislation affecting the federal balance, the requirement of clear statement assures that the legislature has in fact faced, and intended to bring into issue, the critical matters involved in the judicial decision.
How often courts cite the cases defining “clear statement rule”
Court decisions citing the 2 opinions that defined “clear statement rule” — 5,314 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining cases as a whole, not verified uses of the term. The dip in the most recent years is a data-coverage gap, not a real trend — our corpus holds fewer opinions from the latest years.
All 2 definitions, chronological · 1952–1971
- ORIGINAL
when choice has to be made between two readings of what conduct Congress has made a crime, it is appropriate, before we choose the harsher alternative, to require that Congress should have spoken in language that is clear and definite. We should not derive criminal outlawry from some ambiguous implication.
penal statutes