Mullin v. Al Otro Lado · ¶50

For these reasons, the redundancy that troubled the Ninth Circuit is understandable. At any rate, if forced to choose between an interpretation that entails some redundancy and one that contradicts what words usually mean, we would choose the former. See United States v. Atlantic Research Corp., 551 U. S. 128, 137 (2007) (the antisurplusage canon “does not require us to avoid surplusage at all costs”); A. Scalia & B. Garner, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts 176 (2012) (“Put to a choice, however, a court may well prefer ordinary meaning to an unusual meaning that will avoid surplusage”).

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