This book is based on the materials used in Harvard Law School’s 1L “Legislation and Regulation” course, which has rapidly become one of the most popular and effective courses in Harvard’s 1L curriculum, and one of the most successful experiments in introducing statutory and regulatory law and principles into the first year. The book integrates material on statutory interpretation and regulatory law in a single text, and presents this material in a way that is accessible to 1Ls and easy to teach. In addition, this book’s integration of statutory interpretation and regulatory law would make it an attractive alternative text for upper-level Administrative Law courses at schools that do not offer a 1L Legislation & Regulation class, and the material on statutory interpretation would be suitable for a Legislation course focused principally on statutory interpretation.

Although many law schools have recently introduced, or are considering, a first-year course on public law and regulation, there are not currently any casebooks specifically designed for such a course, and instructors have had to make do with books designed for upper-level Administrative Law or Legislation classes, or to develop their own supplements from scratch. This book is meant to fill that gap. The book focuses on the tools and methods of interpreting legal texts, using Supreme Court and other appellate decisions as the primary texts, yet the note material gently introduces students to applicable insights from political science, history, economics, and philosophy. The pedagogical objectives of this book are to familiarize students with the tools and techniques that lawyers and judges use when crafting legal arguments in statutory or regulatory contexts, and to give students a sense of the larger questions of institutional design that are implicated by these interpretive questions.