According to the passage, a dictionary cannot settle a question of statutory meaning because it

is compiled by lexicographers who lack legal training.

omits technical senses of ordinary words.

is revised too infrequently to reflect current usage.

The author mentions that the canons of construction "arrive in opposing pairs" primarily in order to

show that judges apply the canons inconsistently across similar cases.

suggest that the canons should be reduced to a single governing rule.

establish that the canons were developed at different periods.

show that using them requires a prior choice the canons themselves cannot make.

It can be inferred that the author regards the constraint textualism imposes on judges as

illusory, since the theory cannot deliver what it claims.

genuine but narrower than the theory's own account of it.

equivalent to the constraint purposivism imposes.

effective only where a statute's terms are technical rather than ordinary.

Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the argument of the second paragraph?

Most statutes are drafted by professional legislative counsel rather than by legislators.

Judges who describe themselves as textualists reach the same result as one another less often than they claim.

In the overwhelming majority of disputed cases, every plausible context and canon yields the same reading.

Legislative history is cited less often now than it was fifty years ago.

The author's attitude toward textualism is best described as

sympathetic to what it accomplishes and critical of how it describes itself.

hostile to it as a disguise for judicial preference.

convinced that it succeeds on its own terms.

neutral, setting it beside purposivism without preferring either.

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The Plain Meaning That Is Not Plain

PRACTICE

100:00+4 −1MCQ Single Answer

Reading Passage

The textualist account of statutory interpretation rests on a claim about institutional roles. A statute means what its words mean; a judge who looks past those words to the purposes a legislature might have had is substituting private preference for enacted law, and doing so under cover of a method that cannot be checked. The appeal of the position is that it constrains. If meaning is fixed by text, a judge's conclusion can be tested against something public, and interpretation stops being a licence. The difficulty is that "plain meaning" is not a property a word possesses on its own. Words are plain only relative to a context, and choosing the context is itself the interpretive act the theory was meant to remove. Is the relevant usage ordinary or technical? Fixed at enactment or as the term is used now? A dictionary cannot settle the question, since a dictionary records how a word has been used rather than which use governs, and dictionaries compiled in the same decade routinely disagree. The canons of construction fare no better. They arrive in opposing pairs — a statute in derogation of the common law is read narrowly, remedial statutes are read broadly — so a judge must first decide which canon the case calls for, and nothing in the canons decides that. None of this vindicates the alternative. Purposivism has difficulties of its own that are, if anything, worse: legislative history can be manufactured by a single legislator speaking into the record, and the purpose of a statute assembled by hundreds of people is a construct rather than a discovery. The conclusion the criticism actually supports is narrower and more useful than either camp's rhetoric. Textualism's advantage over its rival is real but comparative and procedural, not logical. By restricting which arguments may be made, it makes disagreement more tractable and more visible, without making it disappear. Presented as a method that eliminates judgment rather than disciplining it, textualism promises what no method of reading can deliver.

The primary purpose of the passage is to