textualism

1. (law) A formalist legal theory that interprets based on the ordinary meaning of the legal text.Examples: "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."countableuncountable