Bulletin n. 3/2009
January 2010
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Siegel Jonathan R.
    The Inexorable Radicalization of Textualism
    in University of Pennsylvania Law Review , Vol. 158, issue 1 ,  2009 ,  117-178
    For decades, scholars have divided over how best to interpret statutes, particularly when statutory text pulls in one direction and intent or purpose in another. On one side of the resulting “interpretation wars” stand the textualists, who believe that the goal of statutory interpretation is to identify the objective meaning of statutory text without regard to what any legislator intended that text to mean. Arrayed against them are the intentionalists, who believe that the goal is for courts to implement the intent of the legislature. Also taking the field are the purposivists, who believe that the goal is to identify the purpose of a statute and to interpret it to carry out that purpose. The battles between these methods have raged over decades and have spawned innumerable scholarly commentaries and judicial clashes. The latest move in the interpretation wars, however, is to declare something of a truce. Textualism, intentionalism, and purposivism are either not all that different or at least not different in the way people usually think. That is the message in recent articles representing a new wave of scholarship that attempts to reach an accommodation among competing interpretive methods.
    ©2001 - 2020 - Centro Studi sul Federalismo - P. IVA 94067130016