Donald Beason v. United Technologies Corporation, Hamilton Standard Division

CARDAMONE, Circuit Judge.

To resolve this appeal, we must construe a Connecticut statute prohibiting discrimination in employment practices in that state. Statutes are not empty vessels into which courts, under the guise of construing a statute, pour meaning. Not because it would spoil the statute in the same sense as pouring new wine into old wineskins “bursts the skins,” spills the wine and spoils the skins, Mark 2:22 (R.A. Knox), but because it is the obligation of the courts instead to ascertain the legislature’s purpose in enacting the law, as the elected representatives of the people.…