The use of cannons of construction will not always lead to the legislative purpose the statute was meant to protect. Scalia thinks cannons of construction is a better alternative than using legislative history. He assumes that all cases can fit into a cannon. However, that is not correct. First, for each cannon, there is an equal and opposite cannon. Using this method solely would lack uniformity and make every decision as questionable as the unclear statute the court began with. Furthermore, cannons can mislead judges and make them think they have found the right approach to a statute in a case, but that is a lazy approach to interpretation because this does not allow the judge to use the four elements of good legal reasoning to find the statutory purpose.…show more content… In Caminetti v. United States (1917), two men took their mistresses across state lines on vacation and were prosecuted under the Man Act. The court, in this case, had to determine what is the meaning of the word immoral purpose in the Man Act. However, Justice Day using the ejusdem generis canon determined that other immoral purpose ties in with sexual immorality, and therefore, these men violated the Man Act. If the court had dug into the legislative history, they would have understood why the law was also considered the White Slave Act. The bill was created to protect women from being forced into involuntary prostitution, treated like slaves, and dragged across state lines, not to police prostitution which is a state’s job. Therefore, the textualist approach is not full proof and can lead to errors in judgment of what the law intended to protect when the legislative draft the
