Page:United States Reports 502 OCT. TERM 1991.pdf/593

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Cite as: 502 U. S. 410 (1992)

435

Scalia, J., dissenting

ing found a “natural interpretation of the statutory language [that] does not conflict with any significant state or federal interest, nor with any other aspect of the Code,” id., at 245, we deemed the pre-Code practice to be irrelevant. And whereas today’s opinion announces the policy judgment that “[a]ny increase over the judicially determined valuation during bankruptcy rightly accrues to the benefit of the creditor,” ante, at 417, in Ron Pair we were undeterred by the fact that our result was “arguably somewhat in tension with the desirability of paying all creditors as uniformly as practicable,” 489 U. S., at 245–246. “Congress,” we said, “expressly chose to create that alleged tension.” Id., at 246. Almost point for point, today’s opinion is the methodological antithesis of Ron Pair—and I have the greatest sympathy for the Courts of Appeals who must predict which manner of statutory construction we shall use for the next Bankruptcy Code case. The principal harm caused by today’s decision is not the misinterpretation of § 506(d) of the Bankruptcy Code. The disposition that misinterpretation produces brings the Code closer to prior practice and is, as the Court irrelevantly observes, probably fairer from the standpoint of natural justice. (I say irrelevantly, because a bankruptcy law has little to do with natural justice.) The greater and more enduring damage of today’s opinion consists in its destruction of predictability, in the Bankruptcy Code and elsewhere. By disregarding well-established and oft-repeated principles of statutory construction, it renders those principles less secure and the certainty they are designed to achieve less attainable. When a seemingly clear provision can be pronounced “ambiguous” sans textual and structural analysis, and when the assumption of uniform meaning is replaced by “onesubsection-at-a-time” interpretation, innumerable statutory texts become worth litigating. In the bankruptcy field