Tobia, Slocum, and Nourse on Progressive Textualism @kevin_tobia @vicnourse @GeorgetownLJ

Kevin Tobia, Georgetown University Law Center; Georgetown University, Department of Philosophy, Brian G. Slocum, University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law, and Victoria Nourse, Georgetown University Law Center,are publishing Progressive Textualism in volume 110 of the Georgetown Law Journal. Here is the abstract.

Textualism is now the Court’s lingua franca. In response, some have proposed a “progressive textualism,” defined by the use of traditional textualist methods to reach politically progressive results. This Article explores a different kind of “progressive textualism.” Rather than starting with the desired policy outcome—politically progressive or conservative—we begin from one of modern textualism’s central values: A commitment to “democratic” interpretation. As Justice Barrett argues, this commitment views textualists as “agents of the people” who “approach language from the perspective of an ordinary English speaker.” Textualists thereby claim to promote democracy by interpreting law consistently with what it communicates to the ordinary public. However, recent empirical studies reveal discrepancies between textualist interpretive commitments and how ordinary people understand legal texts. These discrepancies undermine claims that textualists’ methodology is committed to democratic interpretation. A textualism centered on democratic interpretation would be methodologically more progressive if it centered facts rather than fictions about how ordinary people interpret language. It would recognize that people understand legal language in light of linguistic “(co)text” and “(con)text,” and sometimes nonliterally; they often understand ambiguous terms in law to have legal, not ordinary, meanings; and their understanding of law is informed by its apparent purpose and sometimes by interpretive rules that are conventionally justified on normative grounds. In contrast, current textualism is often methodologically regressive, crafting a fictional “ordinary person” more closely connected to ideological policy goals than facts about ordinary language comprehension.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Sunstein on Textualism and the Duck-Rabbit Illusion @CassSunstein @Harvard_Law

Cass R. Sunstein, Harvard Law School, has published Textualism and the Duck-Rabbit Illusion. Here is the abstract.

Textualists insist that judges should follow the ordinary meaning of a legal text, and sometimes texts have an ordinary meaning that judges can follow. But sometimes texts have no such thing, in the sense that they are reasonably susceptible to two or more interpretations. Some textualists fall victim to something like the duck-rabbit illusion. They genuinely see a duck; they insist that a duck is the only thing that reasonable people can see. Their perception is automatic, even though it might have been primed, or a product of preconceptions. But reasonable people might well see a rabbit. Various approaches are possible to determine whether we have a duck or a rabbit; most of them do not turn on the text at all.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Fletcher on Textualism's Gaze @MSULaw

Matthew L. M. Fletcher, Michigan State University College of Law, is publishing Textualism's Gaze in the Michigan Journal of Race and Law. Here is the abstract.

In recent years, perhaps because of the influence of Justice Scalia, the Supreme Court appears to place greater emphasis on texts than ever before. “We’re all textualists now,” Justice Kagan declared in 2015. But it is one thing to say a court will prioritize the text. It is another thing to choose which text is to be prioritized. Follow the textualism of constitutional interpretation and one sees judges prioritize the public understanding of the privileged white men in power at the time of the framing of the constitutional text. Follow the textualism of federal statutory interpretation and one sees judges prioritize the text exclusively, and if the judges engage with the legislative history of the statute they will engage with the public understanding of the legislators who enacted the law, again, largely privileged white men. The victory of textualism is not necessarily in the outcomes, but in significantly narrowing the scope of evidence available to interpret the text, in some cases to almost nothing but the bare words of the statute. Women, persons of color, and other marginalized persons and entities are almost never relevant to the textualist’s gaze. The narrow focus of the textualist’s gaze also warps how Indian law matters are decided. The judiciary rarely considers how the governments and people most affected by the text — Indian tribes and individual Indians — understand the meaning of the text. The judiciary, whether it intends to or not, considers Indians and tribes as extraneous to the interpretive process.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

The Legal Historian and the Text

Steven Wilf, University of Connecticut School of Law, has published Law/Text/Past at 1 Irvine Law Review 543 (2011). Here is the abstract.

How might legal historians read text? What is particular about their modes of reading as opposed to those employed by readers in other disciplines? This essay will analyze the distinctive features of legal texts such as those stemming from the pervasive reliance upon conventions or boilerplate as part of a bricolage construction, the focus upon legitimizing gestures to official authority, and the normative, almost instrumental nature of many legal texts. While other sorts of texts might be more expressive, statutes, for example, always include a sanction. Drawing upon numerous examples, the paper identifies an expansive array of texts, including extra-official legalism; rituals, procedure, and nonverbal texts; and imagined law. While seeking to provide sharp, analytic definitions of what is a legal text, it will forge a path somewhere between establishing a new dichotomy of text/context and, alternatively, proclaiming that everything is text (il n’y a pas de hors-texte). Without making a fetish of the problem of reading, I underscore the ways text might be chimerical, indeterminate, multivocal, slippery, and generally untrustworthy. Text has come to mean too much and too little.
Let me make clear what this paper is not about — it is not a guide to literary techniques for reading, a meandering meditation on the craft of history, or a manifesto for the importance of close readings. But I will situate the problem of text reading in our own historiographic milieu as legal historians. It is not simply the breakdown of the binary construct of law/society that leads to a more self-conscious understanding of how to read a legal historical text.
Legal history is particularly subject to a postmodern sensibility, which erodes interdisciplinary borders, jurisdictional boundaries, and divisions between official and extra-official justice, and which contributes to disintermediation and the loss of the interpretive monopolies of professional elites.
What is the role of the legal historian in this new world?

Download the full text from SSRN at the link.