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Textualism is a Legal formalism theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the Natural language Semantics of the legal text, where no consideration is given to Text linguistics sources, such as Intentionalism of the law Originalism, the problem it was intended to Mischief rule, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (2001) .
Textualists argue courts should read the words of a statutory text as any Natural language Member of Congress would have read them. They look for the meaning "that a reasonable person would gather from the text of the law, placed alongside the remainder of the corpus juris the." The textualist cares about the statutory purpose to the extent that is suggested from the text.
Strict constructionism is often misused by laypersons and critics as a synonym for textualism. Nevertheless, although a textualist could be a strict constructionist, these are distinctive views. To illustrate this, we may quote Justice Scalia, who warns that "textualism should not be confused with so-called strict constructionism, a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute. I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be... A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means."Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation 23 (1997). Similarly, textualism should not be confused with the "plain meaning" approach, a simpler theory used prominently by the Burger Court in cases such as Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill, which looked to the dictionary definitions of words, without reference to common public understanding or context.
As an illustrative example, Justice Scalia refers to a case in which the law provided for a longer sentence when the defendant "uses a firearm" "during and in relation to" a "drug trafficking crime." In the case, the defendant had offered to trade an unloaded gun as barter for cocaine, and the majority (wrongly, in his view) took this meeting the standard for the enhanced penalty. He writes that "a proper textualist" would have decided differently: "The phrase 'uses a gun' fairly connoted use of a gun for what guns are normally used for, that is, as a weapon. As I put the point in my dissent, when you ask someone, 'Do you use a cane?' you are not inquiring whether he has hung his grandfather's antique cane as a decoration in the hallway." (2025). 9780495913474, Wadsworth Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780495913474 Justice Scalia has also written:
Textualists do not, generally, accept the authority of the Courts to "refine" statutes:
Textualists acknowledge the interpretive doctrine of lapsus linguae (slip of the tongue), also called "Clerical error." This doctrine accounts for the situation when on the very face of the statute, it is apparent that there is a mistake of expression. (See, e.g., United States v. X-Citement Video, 513 U.S. 64) (1994) (Scalia, J., dissenting) ("I have been willing, in the case of civil statutes, to acknowledge a doctrine of 'scrivener's error' that permits a court to give an unusual (though not unheard of) meaning to a word which, if given its normal meaning, would produce an absurd and arguably unconstitutional result") and even break it (see, e.g., Green v. Bock Laundry Machine Co., 490 U.S. 504, 527) (1989) (Scalia, J., concurring) ("We are confronted here with a statute which, if interpreted literally, produces an absurd, and perhaps unconstitutional, result. Our task is to give some alternative meaning to the word "defendant" in Federal Rule of Evidence 609(a)(1) that avoids this consequence; and then to determine whether Rule 609(a)(1) excludes the operation of Federal Rule of Evidence 403.") Other textualists might reach alternative conclusions. Scalia's apparent inconsistency is perhaps explained by his choice to sometimes adhere to the more venerable judicial canons of interpretation, such as the constitutional avoidance canon.
The word "textualism" was first used by Mark Pattison in 1863 to criticize Puritan theology, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.17 Oxford English Dictionary 854 (2d ed. 1989) Justice Robert Jackson first used the word "textualism" in a Supreme Court opinion a century later in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer.Jackson wrote that he preferred to "give to the enumerated powers the scope and elasticity afforded by what seem to be reasonable, practical implications, instead of the rigidity dictated by a doctrinaire textualism." 343 U.S. at 640 (Jackson, J., concurring). Jackson's use of the term should be approached with caution, however, as what he had in mind in criticizing textualism was not the textualism known today.
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