> The court has become “more and more obsessed with language and grammar in recent years,” says Stanford Law professor Jeff Fisher. “Oral argument these days can seem like being in a sixth grade English class.”
> “The Court has had cases, for example, that turned on the word ‘so’” and “the use of a definite article instead of indefinite (‘the’ instead of ‘a’),” he says. “This is all a product of the ascendancy of ‘textualism’—the theory of statutory construction that aims to discern precisely what the words Congress enacted mean, as opposed to what Congress probably intended to say.”
Great news, if true, for nerds in comment sections everywhere trying to get away with treating the law as code by nitpicking the letter of the law.