Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.
SCALIA, Antonin & Bryan A. Garner.
Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts.
First Edition of Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts; Signed by Antonin Scalia
St. Paul, MN : Thomson/ West, 2012.
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Item Number: 149843
First edition of this work, which offers concise, articulate and reasoned discussions on reading and interpreting law. Octavo, original boards. Boldly signed by Antonin Scalia on the half-title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. Foreword by Frank H. Easterbrook.
Published in 2012 by Thomson/West, Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts is the magisterial joint work of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the lexicographer and legal-writing authority Bryan A. Garner, and stands as the most comprehensive modern treatise on the principles by which statutes, contracts, and constitutions ought to be read. In this groundbreaking book by the best-selling authors, all the most important principles of constitutional, statutory, and contractual interpretation are systematically explained in an engaging and informative style, illustrated by several hundred examples drawn from actual cases. Running to nearly six hundred pages, the work sets out and defends fifty-seven canons of interpretation - the textual, contextual, grammatical, and structural rules that judges and lawyers have developed over centuries for resolving disputes about the meaning of written law - together with thirteen "falsities exposed," the misguided doctrines, such as the notion that statutes may be reshaped to fit a court's view of their purpose, that the authors argue have corrupted American jurisprudence. Throughout, Scalia and Garner argue for what they call textualism: the conviction that the meaning of a legal text is fixed by the words the lawmaker actually used, understood as a reasonable reader of the time would have understood them, and that the judge's task is to recover that meaning rather than to substitute his or her own policy preferences. Drawing on Anglo-American case law from the seventeenth century to the present and on the deep linguistic and rhetorical scholarship Garner has long brought to legal writing, the work is at once a practitioner's manual, a polemic against judicial activism, and a sustained defense of the rule of law as the rule of words. It is now widely cited by courts at every level and has established itself as the standard reference of the textualist movement in American law.
