textualism
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 1.44 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
A formalist legal theory that interprets based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text.
Countable; Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "First, building on the earlier work of philologists, historians, orientalists, and biblical scholars we have noted already, the late 19th and early 20th centuries witness growth and development of textualism, in which words are seen—no, revered—as the referential embodiment of meaning and truth."
- "And this is the upshot of textualism: textualists do not want judges to make the law. This, at least, is the official doctrine, and it sounds very democratic."
- "The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is generally committed to textualism, a judicial approach that focuses on the words of the law as written rather than its larger purpose or the intentions of its drafters. In a 2015 appearance at Harvard Law School, Justice Kagan said that textualism had triumphed across the ideological spectrum. “We’re all textualists now,” she said then."
Etymology
Etymology tree English textual Proto-Indo-European *-id- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *-idyéti Proto-Hellenic *-íd͏̌d͏̌ō Ancient Greek -ῐ́ζω (-ĭ́zō) Proto-Indo-European *-mos Proto-Indo-European *-mós Ancient Greek -μός (-mós) Ancient Greek -ισμός (-ismós)der. English -ism English textualism From textual + -ism.