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The Cost Of The Text, Richard A. Primus

Articles

Christopher Serkin and Nelson Tebbe's Is the Constitution Special?explores many facets of constitutional interpretation. I will focus here on their observation that constitutional interpretation is "less textual" than statutory interpretation. I place the expression "less textual" in quotation marks because "textual" could mean many things, such that it would often be problematic to characterize one interpretive exercise as more or less textual than another. In Serkin and Tebbe's view, as I understand it, mainstream constitutional interpretation is "less textual " than statutory decisionmaking in that it is less constrained by the words of particular enacted clauses. As a convenient …