Passage A:

When a statute's words admit of only one grammatical reading, courts have traditionally treated that reading as controlling, even where it produces consequences the enacting legislature would likely have disclaimed. A growing chorus of jurists now resists this discipline, invoking the so-called absurdity doctrine to depart from unambiguous text whenever literal application would yield results they deem irrational. The doctrine's defenders present it as a modest safety valve. In practice, however, it operates as a warrant for judges to substitute their own estimation of sound policy for the compromise embodied in the enacted words. Legislation is rarely the product of a single, coherent purpose; it is the residue of bargaining among factions whose aims diverge. A provision that appears absurd to a reviewing court may reflect precisely the concession that secured a majority. To excise such a provision as an oversight is to rewrite the bargain under the guise of interpreting it. Nor is the category of the absurd self-defining. What one judge regards as an intolerable result another will accept as a tolerable, if unfortunate, cost. Because the doctrine supplies no criterion for distinguishing the merely unwise from the genuinely absurd, its application inevitably tracks the interpreter's prior convictions. The rule of law depends on citizens' capacity to order their affairs by reading the statute books; that capacity is undermined when the operative meaning of a text can be displaced by an appeal to consequences visible only after the fact. The remedy for an ill-drafted statute lies with the legislature that drafted it, not with a court impatient for a better one.

Passage B:

The objection that departing from literal text usurps the legislative function rests on an impoverished account of what enacting a statute accomplishes. Legislators do not enact strings of words for their own sake; they enact them as instruments for achieving discernible ends. When a mechanical reading would defeat the very object the provision was designed to serve - punishing a jailer for the escape of a prisoner he risked his life to save, to borrow a familiar illustration - the interpreter who honors the object rather than the letter is not overriding the legislature but cooperating with it. Critics warn that the category of absurdity is indeterminate. Yet interpretation is shot through with judgments of degree, and courts manage them elsewhere without abdicating their role. The absurdity doctrine, properly confined, is not a license to correct unwise laws; it applies only where the literal result is one no reasonable legislator could have intended, not merely one the court would not have chosen. That threshold is demanding, and it screens out the ordinary disagreements about policy that the critics fear. To insist nonetheless on literal enforcement, knowing the outcome contradicts the statute's manifest aim, is to elevate a theory of drafting over the actual communicative act of legislating. It also imposes on legislatures an impossible duty of foresight, requiring them to anticipate and expressly exclude every improbable application. A doctrine that spares them that burden serves, rather than subverts, the legislative will.