THE BROAD CHURCH OF MODERN TEXTUALISM

Nearly thirty years ago, Justice Scalia’s Tanner lectures branded Holy Trinity Church v. United States (1892) as the anti-textualist archetype, a decision trumping the text’s plain meaning with a suspect judicial investigation of the law’s purpose or spirit. And so Holy Trinity seemed, until Gales and Solan’s groundbreaking empirical study supported an alternative reading of the key statutory term (“labor or service”) that would avoid this conflict between text and purpose. Taking inspiration from Gales and Solan, we reconsider Holy Trinity using the precepts of modern textualism, with its increased emphasis on context, pragmatics, anti-literalism, legal meaning, holistic meaning, non-compositionality, and empirically grounded interpretation. This linguistic and legal analysis supports Holy Trinity’s textualist transfiguration—once decidedly anti-textualist, the decision is now a comfortable application of modern textualism.

Whether this illustrates modern textualism’s sophistication or incoherence, it underscores the theory’s reformation and break from the papacy of Scalia.