Textualists

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People who favor interpreting laws and constitutions by strictly adhering to the precise language of the document, giving primacy to the explicit wording rather than outside influences or intent
2. Individuals who interpret legal texts by focusing strictly on the exact words used without considering external context
3. Those who analyze laws and constitutional text relying solely on the document's explicit language and grammatical structure

Etymology: "Textualist" is built from "textual," meaning "of or relating to a text," plus the suffix "-ist," which marks a person who follows or practises a particular doctrine. The suffix has a long route: it descends from the Greek "-istēs," which turned verbs into agent nouns, passed into Latin as "-ista," then through Old French "-iste" into English, where it became a productive way to name adherents of a school of thought. The "-ist" ending is what turns a description of texts into a label for a method. A textualist is someone who holds to a doctrine of reading, the exact words of a document being the thing that matters, and "textual" itself comes from "text," the same root as "textile," since a written work was once thought of as something woven. The plural "textualists" simply refers to a group of such practitioners.

Synonyms: literalists, interpretivists, scholars, commentators, critics