“Any”

Authors

James J. Brudney
Ethan J. Leib

Abstract

Our statute books use the word “any” ubiquitously in coverage and exclusion provisions. As any reader of the Supreme Court’s statutory interpretation docket would know, a large number of cases turn on the contested application of this so-called universal quantifier. It is hard to make sense of the jurisprudence of “any.” And any effort to offer a unified approach—knowing precisely when its scope is expansive (along the “literal-meaning” lines of “every” and “all”) or confining (having a contained domain related to properties provided by contextual cues)—is likely to fail. This Article examines legislative drafting manuals, surveys centuries of Court decisions, and conducts in-depth pairwise comparisons of “any” cases to show the word’s flexible set of uses in its multiple statutory guises. After evaluating evidence of the variability of “any,” we recommend a new approach, a form of an “any” canon. We encourage adjudicators to appreciate the complexity of “any” more systematically and to consult a full range of sources—as even full-throated textualists have authorized from time to time—offering the relevant larger context judges will need to ascertain the scope of “any” in any given statutory scheme.

Rights

© 2023 Brigham Young University Law Review

Recommended Citation

James J. Brudney and Ethan J. Leib, “Any”, 49 BYU L. Rev. 465 (2023).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.byu.edu/lawreview/vol49/iss2/8