Iselin v. United States

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• holding that the courts will not read language into a statute where it would result in “an enlargement of [the statute] by the court, so that what was omitted ... may be included within its scope”
• reasoning that to supply an omission in a statute whose language was plain and unambiguous would transcend the judicial function
• noting that supplying inadvertent omissions to a statute \transcends the judicial function\
• noting that supplying inadvertent omissions to a stat- ute \transcends the judicial function\
• noting that the court is not “allowed to add or subtract words from a statute” that may better serve a certain policy and underscoring that a court’s “task is merely to apply statutory language, not to rewrite it”
• reasoning that adding words to statutes “transcends 4 The Court declines to opine on Williams’s use of the word “yet” and his imposition of some sort of temporal aspect on “when” sexual orientation will be actionable. the judicial function”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).