{"id":6847,"date":"2022-09-02T13:17:55","date_gmt":"2022-09-02T17:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/?page_id=6847"},"modified":"2025-05-12T11:13:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:13:06","slug":"progressive-textualism","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/in-print\/volume-110\/volume-110-issue-6-september-2022\/progressive-textualism\/","title":{"rendered":"Progressive Textualism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"p2\"><i>Textualism is now the Court\u2019s lingua franca. In response, some have proposed a \u201cprogressive textualism,\u201d defined by the use of traditional textualist methods to reach politically progressive results. This Article explores a different kind of \u201cprogressive textualism.\u201d Rather than starting with the desired policy outcome<\/i>\u2014<i>politically progressive or conservative<\/i>\u2014 <i>we begin from one of modern textualism\u2019s central values: a commitment to \u201cdemocratic\u201d interpretation. As Justice Barrett argues, this commitment views textualists as \u201cagents of the people\u201d who \u201capproach language from the perspective of an ordinary English speaker.\u201d 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 call into question claims that textualists\u2019 methodology is committed to democratic interpretation.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><i>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 \u201c(co)text\u201d and \u201c(con) text,\u201d 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 \u201cordinary person\u201d more closely connected to ideological policy goals than facts about ordinary language comprehension.<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Continue Reading\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/26\/2022\/09\/Tobia-et-al-Progressive-Textualism.pdf\">Progressive Textualism<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/26\/2022\/09\/Tobia-et-al-Progressive-Textualism.pdf\" class=\"pdfemb-viewer\" style=\"\" data-width=\"max\" data-height=\"max\" data-toolbar=\"bottom\" data-toolbar-fixed=\"off\">Tobia et al, Progressive Textualism<\/a>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Textualism is now the Court\u2019s lingua franca. In response, some have proposed a \u201cprogressive textualism,\u201d defined by the use of traditional textualist methods to reach politically progressive results. This Article [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8284,"featured_media":0,"parent":6815,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"abstract.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":"","_tec_slr_enabled":"","_tec_slr_layout":""},"class_list":["post-6847","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"ticketed":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6847","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8284"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6847"}],"version-history":[{"count":98,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6847\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23282,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6847\/revisions\/23282"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/6815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.law.georgetown.edu\/georgetown-law-journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6847"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}