Talk:Antonin Scalia
I don't get the humor. Can somebody please explain the humor? It's not fair. I want to laugh--User:Brxbrx/sig 06:19, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
- You'll understand when you're older, son. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 06:22, 8 September 2011 (UTC)
"Scalia considered himself a textualist and a Constitutional originalist, a rather meaningless term. "Textualism" means he interpreted laws by their plain meaning."
I think that this part is wrong. Whatever you think of Textualism, it acutally does have a defined meaning.https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/textualism Its a rejection of intentionalism. The same argument applies to Originalism. It means interpreting the constitution according to either original intent or original meaning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Originalism
Because of that, textualism and originalism are not the same thing. You can be an originalist, and not a textualist, if you believe that original intent is controlling. You can be a textualist, and not an originalist. You just need to interpret laws and statues by the meaning they have now rather than when they were written. So treating them like they are the same thing, and meaningless, is wrong. They are as meaningful and distinct as pretty much any other schools of legal interpretive thought. Sewblon (talk) 20:23, 10 April 2020 (UTC)