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Comment by OpieCunningham | Hacker News Reader

Textualism is nothing more than interpreting something in a way that you believe doesn't align with some older thing you also interpreted in a way. "I believe this new law is incompatible with what I believe this old rule says."

You may be right or you may be wrong, anyone can do it, and anyone who does will mostly come to their conclusion based upon their personal political beliefs. Hence, a reason the Supreme Court has so many partisan split rulings.

Textualism is pure nonsense, used to present a false sense of rationality to an opinion. Any self-proclaimed textualist is either deceiving themselves or attempting to deceive others.

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> Textualism is pure nonsense, used to present a false sense of rationality

No. You're just saying that people have biases and thus everything is a lie.

Textualism is a thing, and exists outside of law. Textualists think that the authors specific words are important. "Why did Tolkien say X? It must matter, he's a careful author."

I value it in the field of law because legal disputes caused by textual confusion can be avoided through careful writing and textualism leads to the type of thinking that is capable of that. And if nobody cared about the words, how sloppy would the thinking also be?

Textualism outside of law is fun. Enjoy. In the context of law, and this entire thread, it's nonsense used by people to make themselves think they are smart, or trick other people into thinking they must be smart. In law, everything is textualism, and therefore anyone who claims textualist jurisprudence as a distinct thing they practice are simply attempting to classify anyone else as not smart enough to form valid opinions about what words and phrases mean.

> In law, everything is textualism

Everything should be. But 95% of everything is really people decrying textualism and actively choosing their ideology.

> it's nonsense used by people to make themselves think they are smart

What nonsense did you use?

>But 95% of everything is really people decrying textualism and actively choosing their ideology.

Of course the textualist thinks only he is above ideology. This is how you can tell they're clowns.