Antonin Scalia’s defense of the Constitution was rooted in a determination to let the law speak for itself. His “textualism” took its motive force from the simple idea that a judge’s job is to apply the law (or adjudicate under the law) rather than to change it to mean what it “should” mean, or what he wants it to mean. Only if the plain words of the text are ambiguous does a judge have the right to look behind them, and then only to clearly relevant materials such as contemporaneous dictionaries, well-established rules of construction, and perhaps sections of the same or similar legislation using the same term in the same fashion. The job is not to judge the purpose, but rather to determine the meaning, of the text.
