A Day of Semantics for High Court

WASHINGTON — Forget the debate over gun rights or foreign law. For the justices of the Supreme Court, the actual words of the law usually carry more weight than does ideology.

That point was demonstrated in two decisions handed down Tuesday.

In the first, the five most liberal justices voided the conviction of a Pennsylvania man who had been charged with a federal crime for buying a handgun after he had served prison time in Japan for gun crimes there.

Under federal law, an American may not own a firearm once he or she has been convicted “in any court” for a serious gun crime. Bush administration lawyers defended the law and said it covered convictions in foreign courts.

But writing for the majority in the 5-3 decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer disagreed and said the gun law’s reference to “any court” did not mean foreign courts. It applied only to domestic courts, he said, not to courts in Mexico, Canada or overseas.

The high court’s conservatives dissented. They said the plain words of the law extended its reach to the case of the Pennsylvania gun owner.

“Foreign convictions,” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas, are “just as reliable as domestic convictions.”

The dispute over how to read the words of the law is a recurring one, and it rarely has much to do with broader ideology.

Breyer and the liberal justices say the words of the law need to be read in context.

“When I say I am interested in going to any theater tonight, I don’t mean a theater in Japan,” he said in the courtroom Tuesday in summarizing his opinion.

The gun-control law was enacted in 1968, and the “common-sense notion [is] that Congress generally legislates with domestic concerns in mind,” Breyer said.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O’Connor, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg joined him in voiding the conviction of the Pennsylvania gun owner and limiting the reach of the gun-control law.

But Thomas and his fellow conservatives say the court should rely on the plain words of the law, without trying to discern what Congress might have meant.

“In concluding that ‘any’ means not what it says but rather a ‘subset of any,’ the court distorts the plain meaning of the statute,” Thomas wrote. Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy joined his dissent.

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist took no part in the decision in Small vs. U.S. because it was heard in November when he was at home recovering from surgery.

The role of foreign legal opinions has been much debated of late.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and other leading conservatives have sharply criticized the Supreme Court as too liberal and too willing to consider foreign legal opinions when ruling on U.S. cases.

Scalia has said that he too faults his liberal colleagues for using foreign law to decide U.S. cases. In a rebuttal of sorts, Ginsburg said in a recent speech that judges would be wise to at least consider the views of foreign courts.

Those broad views to the contrary, Ginsburg voted to limit the reach of U.S. law to U.S. courts in the gun-control case decided Tuesday, while Scalia voted with Thomas to say foreign convictions should be honored in U.S. courts.

In the second case, Thomas spoke for a conservative majority in ruling that Americans who conspired to evade a foreign nation’s taxes could be prosecuted in the United States.

The 5-4 decision upheld the convictions of three New York men who smuggled thousands of cases of whiskey across the border for sale in Canada and did not pay the high Canadian excise taxes. U.S. prosecutors charged them with violating a federal wire-fraud law, which makes illegal “any scheme to defraud.”

“It may seem an odd use of the federal government’s resources to prosecute a U.S. citizen for smuggling cheap liquor into Canada,” Thomas conceded. “But the broad language of the wire-fraud statute authorizes it to do so, and no canon of statutory construction permits us to read the statute more narrowly.”

Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor and Kennedy joined his opinion, which concluded that the words “any scheme” mean any scheme, even one that takes place beyond U.S. borders.

In dissent, Ginsburg wrote that the court should not extend its laws “to enforce another country’s tax laws.”

“Today’s novel decision is all the more troubling for its failure to take account of Canada’s primary interest in the matter at stake,” she wrote. If Canadian prosecutors want to enforce their tax laws, they should seek extradition of the three men and prosecute them in Canada, she added.

Scalia, Souter and Breyer joined her dissent in Pasquantino vs. U.S.