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Full-Text Articles in Law
Textualism Today: Scalia’S Legacy And His Lasting Philosophy, Chase Wathen
Textualism Today: Scalia’S Legacy And His Lasting Philosophy, Chase Wathen
University of Miami Law Review
Appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986 by President Reagan, Justice Antonin Scalia redefined the philosophy of textualism. Although methods like the plain meaning rule had been around for over a century, the textualist philosophy of today was not mainstream. While Scalia’s textualism is thought to be a conservative philosophy, Scalia consistently maintained that it was judicial restraint rather than conservatism at the heart of his method. The key tenant of Scalia’s new textualism was an outright rejection of legislative history, which he often brought up in opinions only to mock and dismiss as irrelevant. Starting with the hypothesis that …
Statutory Interpretation From The Outside, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Statutory Interpretation From The Outside, Kevin Tobia, Brian G. Slocum, Victoria Frances Nourse
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
How should judges decide which linguistic canons to apply in interpreting statutes? One important answer looks to the inside of the legislative process: Follow the canons that lawmakers contemplate. A different answer, based on the “ordinary meaning” doctrine, looks to the outside: Follow the canons that guide an ordinary person’s understanding of the legal text. We offer a novel framework for empirically testing linguistic canons “from the outside,” recruiting 4,500 people from the United States and a sample of law students to evaluate hypothetical scenarios that correspond to each canon’s triggering conditions. The empirical findings provide evidence about which traditional …