In the forty years since the landmark decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, the Supreme Court has narrowed the expansive vision of student-protected speech espoused in that case. Tinker held that school officials cannot restrict a student’s expression of opinion unless it will contribute to a disturbance in the educational environment. Since then, Tinker has governed situations where a school district implements content- or viewpoint-based regulations of student expression. For example, Tinker has been applied where a school punished students who wore “scab” buttons to protest replacement teachers during a school strike and where school administrators implemented a policy against inappropriate public displays of affection in part because “such conduct . . . sends the wrong message.”

There remains a long-standing fault line under the Tinker doctrine that the Court has acknowledged but has yet to repair: is Tinker’s standard limited to only content- and viewpoint-based regulations of student speech, or does it also apply to content-neutral restrictions? Content-neutral regulations are speech limitations “justified without reference to the content of the regulated speech,” such as a school uniform policy enacted for purposes unrelated to restricting student expression through clothing or a leaflet policy designed to “decrease distractions” at school by controlling when students may distribute materials.

Finding methodological consensus for statutory interpretation cases is all the rage these days. Some in the academy sing the praises of a singular judicial approach to questions of statutory interpretation and bemoan the frustrations associated with judges implementing a mélange of interpretive techniques. And now, thanks to Abbe Gluck’s authoritative article, Laboratories of Statutory Interpretation, proponents of interpretive uniformity have evidence that some state courts seem to be applying methodological stare decisis to decide questions of statutory interpretation. After exhaustive reading and analysis of state statutory interpretation cases—cases that have received far less attention than their federal counterparts—Gluck describes several important developments in state legisprudence that she thinks may have significant implications for the federal system.

But the normative thrust of her work gives us pause. Although Gluck offers several caveats that qualify her normative conclusions, she is essentially committed to two views: that interpretive consensus in statutory interpretation is an important value and that the version of interpretive consensus employed by the state courts in her case studies, a method she calls “modified textualism,” is a normatively attractive compromise between the main claims of textualists and purposivists. Neither of these contentions, however, is particularly convincing.