Who Interprets The Law? Ambiguous Language in Vanderstok v. Garland

In the past forty years, thousands of cases have come before federal courts concerning the power of executive agencies to interpret ambiguous legislation [1]. Since 1984, courts have used the so-called “Chevron doctrine,” articulated in Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. NRDC (1984) (“Chevron”), to resolve these cases. The Chevron doctrine delegated the interpretation of most Congressional legislation to the relevant executive agency, so that courts could usually defer to agency judgments. But, in another precedent-shaping term last year, the Supreme Court overruled Chevon, stating that courts must now “exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority [2].” This delegation to courts rests on the assumption that judges will be able to take complex statutory questions and ambiguous language and deliver consistent, non-partisan, and objective interpretations. Proponents have incorrectly espoused textualism — a legal philosophy that focuses exclusively on the words of a statute themselves — as the means to reach such objective decisions.

Under the new post-Chevron status quo, courts are free to use the supposed objectivity of textualism to disguise their agendas. This allows courts to take textual ambiguities in whichever direction they choose or to disregard textualism entirely whenever it suits their interests [3]. To understand how post-Chevron cases may be decided, this paper will analyze a recent case about agency interpretation that did not rely on the Chevron doctrine, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling in Vanderstok v. Garland (2023) (“Vanderstok”). Vanderstok shows the danger of delegating all interpretative powers to the judicial branch — turning unelected judges into partisan policy-makers and amateur regulators — and, without intervention from the Supreme Court, will only be a harbinger of future improper decisions from the courts. By understanding Vanderstok’s flawed jurisprudence, this paper will show the danger of allowing courts to brandish their new post-Chevron authority to issue faulty decisions.

The Fifth Circuit’s decision in Vanderstok exemplifies both textualism-based judicial overreach and the significant dangers posed by unregistered firearms to Americans [4]. Vanderstok questioned bureaucratic authority over firearm manufacturing amidst increasing rates of gun violence in America [5]. In addition to traditional over-the-counter firearms, so-called “ghost guns” — unregistered guns made at home from ordered parts or kits — are an increasing danger to the public and a regulatory hassle for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), the executive agency tasked with gun regulation [6]. In April, 2022 in an attempt to regulate these ghost guns, the Biden administration’s ATF promulgated new interpretations of the words “firearm” and “frame or receiver” in the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA), the main gun control statute at the federal level. These new regulations were challenged in court by ghost gun manufacturers for overreaching the ATF’s authority. The case progressed to the highly Conservative Fifth Circuit — located in the deep South with a super-majority of Republican-appointed judges — which issued its 3–0 ruling against the ATF in Vanderstok v. Garland (2023) [7]. The Fifth Circuit falsely claimed to employ an objective, textualist reading in this decision. The Court stated that determining whether the ATF had “exceeded its statutory authority” was “[s]imple,” requiring only an analysis of “the plain language” of the GCA [8]. Specifically, it claimed that the ATF’s new definitions were unconstitutionally broader than the plain meaning of the Congressional definitions, giving the ATF regulatory powers that were not delineated by Congress. This finding imperiled the ATF’s ability to regulate ghost guns, allowing untraceable gun kits to flow into the hands of criminals [9]. In April of 2024, concerned by the dangerous implications of this ruling, the Supreme Court issued a writ of certiorari for the case, allowing it to be petitioned before the Justices, who heard oral arguments in the case on October 8, 2024 [10].

The Fifth Circuit’s decision that the ATF’s new interpretation of “firearm” was inconsistent with the law stands on subjective grounds. In 18 U.S.C 921 (a section of the Federal code created by the GCA), Congress defined a “firearm” to include “any weapon … which may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive [11].” The ATF’s challenged new regulations included in this category any “weapon parts kit that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to expel a projectile by action of an explosive [12].” At first glance, these definitions sound nearly identical. The Fifth Circuit, however, argued that weapons parts kits can not be “readily converted” into firearms, since such an assembly takes multiple steps and several minutes [13]. Thus, they claimed that parts kits do not fall under the GCA’s definition of firearm but instead are individual firearm components and therefore not regulated by the ATF [14]. Such reasoning assumes that “readily” has a distinct black-and-white definition. Even if, however, a textualist attempted to find the “plain meaning” of “readily” in 1968 by consulting a relevant entry in a dictionary from the period, they would find only the similarly vague synonyms of “easily” or “speedily” [15]. This is not because Congress had some secret precise definition of “readily” but because, like “best” or “happiest” or thousands of other words, the meaning of “readily” varies. There is no clear line where, in every case, after x minutes or y steps, a process no longer becomes readily achievable [16]. A different court could just as easily have defined readily convertible as any process taking under eight hours, as the Solicitor General suggested to the Supreme Court [17]. Thus, the Court’s finding that the ATF’s definition of “firearm” superseded the authority the GCA granted hinged entirely on a subjective definition of “readily.” Such subjective rulings imperil the judicial process, which relies on consistent and impartial readings of the law.

At first glance, the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the meaning of “frame or receiver” may seem more objective and justified; not so. The Fifth Circuit ruled that, because the original statute says only “the frame or receiver of any such weapon” as defined above can be regulated as a firearm [18], the ATF’s definition of a “frame or receiver,” which included “partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver[s]” that could be readily converted into frames or receivers, was illegally overbroad and regulated parts not covered by the GCA. [19]. But should you accept the ATF’s interpretation of “firearm” as explicated in the previous paragraph, its definition of “frame or receiver” follows quite naturally: In accepting that a weapons parts kit could be a weapon, it is absurd to suggest that the frame or receiver must be fully intact to be regulated. Imagine a hypothetical gun made of two halves that could snap together by applying light force (an “Ikea gun,” we might call it). The two halves of the frame of the Ikea gun, taken together, are the frame of the weapon, not because they currently serve the purpose of a frame but because, in the schematics of the kit, they are materially identical to the frame. To suggest otherwise would be to say that a shoelace sold with a pair of sneakers is not a shoelace until it is woven into a shoe, since only then does it fulfill the purpose of a shoelace; before, it is just a piece of string that could be “readily converted” into a shoelace. Objects are typically defined not by their current use but by their potential functions, as the ATF did in its definition of “frame or receiver.” Put simply, the ATF’s interpretation of the statute was utterly in line with the plain reading of the text.

To clarify, the purpose of this textualist analysis was not to provide the real, objective, and singular meaning of 18 U.S.C 921’s definitions. The Fifth Circuit’s textualist readings, along with the alternate arguments presented here, are both at least cogent. The goal, instead, was to show that alternate readings are possible with somewhere between little and no way to determine the correct reading (if one even exists) through textualism alone. Ambiguities that can not be settled through the text alone are abundant in statutes and inherent in language, nay, communication itself. The Fifth Circuit itself implicitly acknowledged this in their appeal to a variety of non-textualist strains of argument to augment their textualist reading, despite claiming a textualist approach throughout the decision. The decision at times defaults to purposivist readings, looking at the evolution of Congressional gun legislation to ascertain the “legislative will” [20]; originalist readings, focusing on the “long-standing tradition of at-home weapon-making” in America [21]; and even pragmatic readings, arguing from potential real-world confusion the ATF’s regulations might cause [22]. Non-textualist judicial philosophies are not problematic per se, just as textualism itself can be a valid form of judicial analysis. The problem comes when these methodologies are cherry-picked and then applied retroactively, reinforcing a ruling ultimately determined not by the facts before the court, but by the judges’ own politics.

This is not to suggest that this problem is unique to the Fifth Circuit or to any particular ideology. In fact, perhaps the greatest threat that an untethered post-Chevron judiciary poses is its propensity for disagreements between ideologically opposed courts, each professing to use objective analysis to arrive at their own subjective, politicized conclusions. As the Supreme Court stated when they overturned Chevron, “[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is [23].” Without deference to the regulators, different courts will reach increasingly divergent conclusions on “what the law is,” creating uncertainty for our country while allowing politicized courts to issue new Vanderstok-esque common laws that endanger both Americans and the integrity of their courts.

Bibliography

[1] Chevron, the overturned precedent on these disputes for the past 40 years, had been cited over 18,000 times.

[2] Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), 1.

[3] See West Virginia v. EPA (2022), Kagan dissenting. Noting the majority’s apparent disregard for the plain meaning of a statute’s text (a textualist reading) in favor of policy concerns (a pragmatic reading), Kagan wrote, “[s]ome years ago, I remarked that ‘[w]e’re all textualists now.’ It seems I was wrong.”

[4] The Supreme Court did stay the circuit court’s decision, allowing the ATF’s regulations to go into place. This article is more concerned with the potential effects of future cases, built with the same tools as Vanderstok, than the specific harm of Vanderstok, which would have been great had the Supreme Court not acted. However, even if the Supreme Court reverses the Fifth’s decision in this case (and every other case like it that it hears), that will change neither the underlying issues of post-Chevron jurisprudence outlined in this article, nor the vast majority of future cases, which will not make it to the Supreme Court.

[5] “On gun violence, the United States is an outlier,” Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, published October 31, 2023, https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-data/gun-violence-united-states-outlier.

[6] For ghost guns, see Glenn Thrush, “‘Ghost Guns’: Firearm Kits Bought Online Fuel Epidemic of Violence,” November 14, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/14/us/ghost-guns-homemade-firearms.html. For the ATF, see Vanderstok v. Garland (2023), 4.

[7] Vanderstok, 28–9.

[8] Vanderstok, 12.

[9] Transcript of oral argument, Garland v. Vanderstok (2024), 85, supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/argument_transcripts/2024/23-852_o759.pdf.

[10] “Garland v. VanDerStok,” SCOTUSblog, accessed September 29, 2024, https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/garland-v-vanderstok-2/.

[11] “18 U.S. Code § 921 - Definitions,” Legal Information Institute, accessed October 6, 2024, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/921.

[12] Vanderstok, 8.

[13] The Fifth Circuit previously held in United States v. Ryles (1993) that a disassembled firearm that could be restored in under thirty seconds was a firearm, thus setting a lower bound for readily convertible firearms. That is, in some cases, weapon parts could constitute a firearm. Nowhere in Vanderstok do they offer guidance for what amount of time and/or steps required for conversion into a usable firearm distinguishes a readily convertible weapon from a collection of weapon parts.

[14] Vanderstok, 20.

[15] Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, 1967, s.v. “Readily.”

[16] Much has been made of exactly how time-consuming and expertise-driven the assembly of ghost guns kits is. But, as shown here, depending on the definition of “readily,” virtually any line could be drawn between weapon and weapon parts, so that the exact specifics become irrelevant.

[17] Transcript of oral argument, Garland, 36.

[18] 18 U.S. Code § 921.

[19] Vanderstok, 14–15.

[20] Vanderstok, 2, 17–18.

[21] Vanderstok, 22.

[22] Vanderstok, 23.

[23] Loper, 2, citing Marbury v. Madison (1803).