As noted earlier, courts start statutory interpretation by consulting the statute’s plain language, and they are almost always happiest when they are using language from within the statute to formulate their analysis.

Their bottom line goes something like this: No matter what courts say, or what the legislative history says, or what other statutes say, the language in this statute is the best evidence of what the legislative body wanted to do here. Accordingly, they like to start their analysis by focusing very narrowly on (1) the plain language at issue. If that focus does not yield results, they may broaden their focus to look at (2) the sentence structure of that language, and/or (3) the language of the rest of the statute, and the purpose of that statute.