Judicial debates are often done in footnotes. I am NOT a fan of textualism and I agree with Justice Jackson
Justice Jackson mounts a lonely crusade at the Supreme Court
This week’s Deadline: Legal Newsletter examines what a footnote can tell us about the state of play among the justices.
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— Phyllis B Kantor (@wiselady11.bsky.social) 2025-06-21T01:05:02.904Z
https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/deadline-legal-blog/supreme-court-ketanji-brown-jackson-dissent-deadline-newsletter-rcna214180
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the footnote in question. It came in her dissent from a decision Friday in a case called Stanley v. City of Sanford. Led by Justice Neil Gorsuch (Jackson’s sometimes-partner in certain libertarian-ish side-quests), the majority ruled against Karyn Stanley, a former firefighter who had sued a Florida city over health-insurance retirement benefits.
But disagreement over statutory interpretation prompted a heated exchange between the majority and the dissent. Gorsuch said Jackson bucked “textualism,” referring to the strict reading of statutes without regard to other considerations, like congressional intent behind the law. The Trump appointee accused the Biden appointee of doing so in an attempt to “secure the result” she sought.
That amounts to fighting words in a profession that prides itself on the narrative that judges decide cases through neutral mechanisms without regard to outcomes.
Jackson fought back in that footnote — footnote 12, to be exact. She said Gorsuch’s accusation of motivated reasoning “stems from an unfortunate misunderstanding of the judicial role.” Indeed, she said, accounting for congressional intent helps avoid injecting one’s view into the law. “By contrast,” she wrote, “pure textualism’s refusal to try to understand the text of a statute in the larger context of what Congress sought to achieve turns the interpretive task into a potent weapon for advancing judicial policy preferences.” That is, it’s the majority’s approach that lets judges reach their preferred results.
To be sure, debates over textualism and the judicial role aren’t new. Indeed, Jackson’s predecessor, Stephen Breyer, famously dueled on the subject with Gorsuch’s predecessor, Antonin Scalia.
Textualism has been used by Scalia and others to ignore the intent of congress to get at the desired result. I applaud Justice Jackson for this dissent
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