Published February 24, 2025
Andrew Stark’s otherwise interesting review of “Fewer Rules, Better People” (Bookshelf, Feb. 18) is marred by a badly confused passage in which he asserts that Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner, in their treatise “Reading Law,” oppose “repeatedly interpret[ing] the Constitution according to the same canon.” Scalia and Garner embrace textualism—of which originalism is a subpart—as the proper method of interpreting all legal texts, including the Constitution. Their discussion of how to use the 57 valid canons of statutory interpretation, e.g., the negative-implication canon, in no way suggests that they regard “the demands of social justice” as a “canon” that judges might invoke in interpreting a legal document. Scalia devoted his judicial career to fighting against this folly.
Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies. He is the longest-serving President in EPPC’s history, having held that position from March 2004 through January 2021.
