FS Credit Opportunities Corp. v. Saba Capital Master Fund, Ltd. · ¶93

Using legislative history as a tool of statutory interpretation is a time-honored tradition. Indeed, the Judiciary’s collective “old-time devotion” to the legislative- history hymnal, ante, at 14, held steady for more than a century—until the late 1980s, when the Court suddenly began to sing a different tune. See S. Breyer, On the Uses of Legislative History in Interpreting Statutes, 65 S. Cal. L. Rev. 845, 846 (1992) (explaining that the Supreme Court used to rely on legislative history so routinely that a discussion of it appeared “in almost every statutory case [the Court] decided in 1981” and the shift away from legislative history did not begin in earnest until 1989); see also P. Wald, Some Observations on the Use of Legislative History in the 1981 Supreme Court Term, 68 Iowa L. Rev. 195, 197 (1983) (explaining that, in the flurry of legislative activity during the New Deal era and…

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