"Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity."

Check out my new law review article, hot of the press: The New Absurdity Doctrine, 125 Penn State L. Rev. 353 (2021).  You can read the abstract after the jump.

State legislatures often write incredibly broad criminal statutes, the strict application of which sometimes produces absurd results. One such example is when a statute technically requires a defendant to register as a sex offender even though he was never convicted, or even accused, of a sex crime. 

In situations like that, the absurdity doctrine permits the court to disregard the plain language of the statute to avoid an absurd and unjust outcome. In theory, the absurdity doctrine has been approved in all states; in practice, however, it often fails to protect defendants from absurd results such as the one described above. 

One reason the absurdity doctrine fails is, when applying it, courts often focus on legislative intent—an approach riddled with practical and theoretical problems. But divining the legislature’s intent should not be a prerequisite for using the absurdity doctrine. Rather, the doctrine actually serves as a check on the legislature, setting “boundaries or conditions on legislative power.” 

This Article therefore proposes a new formulation of the absurdity doctrine focused exclusively on case outcomes. Instead of straining to divine legislative intent, courts should simply decide whether—through use of “rule of law values” such as “reasonableness, rationality, and common sense”—the application of a criminal statute to a given case produces an absurd outcome. In sum, courts should simply strive “never [to] be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity.” 

This Article then applies the new absurdity doctrine to the real-life sex-offender registration case discussed above, illustrating how it would have saved the defendant from the life-ruining registry. This Article also explains an important limitation that must be placed on the judiciary’s use of the absurdity doctrine.