On October 27, Professor Marco Basile invited law students to reconsider the relationship between mercy and legal interpretation during a talk hosted by the St. Thomas More Society. Drawing on his experience as a lawyer, judicial clerk, and legal historian, Basile explored whether compassion can play a meaningful role in interpreting statutes within an increasingly textualist legal landscape.
“I feel like we live in very polarized times,” Basile observed, explaining his interest in mercy as a concept that can complement traditional understandings of justice and rights.
His talk examined the tension between two principles of statutory interpretation: giving words their ordinary meaning and stopping the inquiry when a statute’s meaning appears clear. Basile questioned whether courts can confidently declare a statute unambiguous when judges sharply disagree about its meaning.
Turning to legal history, Basile traced the development of interpretive principles that favor politically vulnerable groups, including Native American nations and criminal defendants. He discussed the historical idea that “when a law is ambiguous, you should favor the weak. You should show mercy on the weak.”
Basile connected this tradition to the work of nineteenth-century legal thinker Francis Lieber and explored whether favoring disadvantaged groups could be grounded in the principles underlying republican government, rather than treated as an assortment of isolated interpretive exceptions.
For Basile, history offers a way to challenge contemporary assumptions about law. As he explained: “The reason I do legal history is it’s like foreign travel. You’re going to wander into the past to see how some people thought about the problem differently. And it’s just going to challenge us to think differently about something.” Studying how earlier thinkers approached legal interpretation, he suggested, can help modern jurists reconsider established methods.
Although Basile emphasized that his proposal remains exploratory, his talk encouraged students to consider whether mercy and compassion can inform statutory interpretation while remaining consistent with lawful judicial decision-making.