absurdity doctrine
Definitions from Case Law · United States Supreme Court
Definitions from Case Law
From 282 U.S. 55 - Crooks v. Harrelson · 1930Most cited · 1,196 citing opinions
the principle is to be applied to override the literal terms of a statute only under rare and exceptional circumstances... to justify a departure from the letter of the law upon that ground, the absurdity must be so gross as to shock the general moral or common sense
How often courts cite the case defining “absurdity doctrine”
Court decisions citing the opinion that defined “absurdity doctrine” — 1,184 in all, by decade. Counts are citations to the defining case 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.