Page:United States v. Hansen.pdf/37

Rh context in particular, the Court “may impose a limiting construction on a statute only if it is ‘readily susceptible’ to such a construction.” Ibid. (some internal quotation marks omitted).

Application of our ordinary principles of statutory interpretation here reveals that the encouragement provision is not susceptible to the narrow solicitation or facilitation construction that the majority adopts, as explained below. Thus, this statute is overbroad and facially invalid under the First Amendment.

The majority contends that the encouragement provision uses “ ‘encourage’ ” and “ ‘induce’ ” in a “specialized, criminal-law sense,” under which those words are essentially synonymous with solicitation and facilitation and carry certain narrowing features of those crimes. But that construction of the statute is untenable for the reasons that follow.

The majority starts its interpretation of the encouragement provision “with some background on solicitation and facilitation,”, instead of addressing any of the terms in the encouragement provision itself. This is the first clue that the majority’s statutory analysis is unusual. Ordinarily, we start with the text of the statute being interpreted. Yet the words “solicitation” and “facilitation” appear nowhere in the encouragement provision. (As the majority notes, facilitation is “also called aiding and abetting,” ibid.—another term that is absent from the encouragement provision.)

The majority goes on to explain that the terms that do appear in the encouragement provision—“encourage” and “induce”—are also often used (with other words) to define “solicitation” and “facilitation.” For example,