Strict construction requires a judge to apply the text only as it is written. Once the court has a clear meaning of the text, no further investigation is required. Judges—in this view—should avoid drawing inferences from a statute or constitution and focus only on the text itself. Justice Hugo Black argued that the First Amendment's injunction, that Congress shall make no law, should be construed strictly: no law, thought Black, admits no exceptions. However, "strict construction" is not a synonym for textualism or originalism. Antonin Scalia, a major proponent of textualism, said that "no one ought to be" a strict constructionist, although to be a strict constructionist was preferred to being a "nontextualist". The term often contrasts with the phrase "judicial activism", used to describe judges who seek to enact legislation through court rulings.
Common use
"Strict constructionism" is also used in American political discourse as an umbrella term for conservative legal philosophies such as originalism and textualism, which emphasize judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning of constitutions and laws. It is frequently used even more loosely to describe any conservative judge or legal analyst. This usage is pervasive, but in some tension with the legal meaning of the term. For example, on the campaign trail in 2000, when speaking on his choices for new Supreme Court Justices, George W. Bush promised to appoint "strict constructionists in the mold of Justices Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas", though Thomas considers himself an originalist, and Scalia outright rejected strict construction, calling it "a degraded form of textualism", his modus operandi.
History
The use of the term strict construction in American politics is not new. The term was used regularly by members of the Democratic-Republican Party and Democrats during the antebellum period when they argued that powers of the federal government listed in Article I should be strictly construed. They embraced this approach in the hope that it would ensure that the bulk of governmental power would remain with the states and not be usurped by the federal government via novel interpretations of its powers. Perhaps the best known example of this approach is Jefferson's opinion arguing against the constitutionality of a national bank. Because the vagueness of Article I inevitably lent itself to broad interpretations as well as narrow ones, strict constructionists turned to the somewhat restrained descriptions of the powers of Congress that were offered by advocates of the Constitution during ratification. Thus, politicians who identified themselves as strict constructionists embraced an approach to constitutional interpretation that resembles what we today call originalism. A broadly accepted, but possibly apocryphal, story has Davy Crockett delivering a speech called "Not Yours To Give", in which he urged the United States Congress to reject an appropriation for a Naval widow on the grounds that Congress had no Constitutional authority to give charity. He was said to have been inspired to this view by Horatio Bunce, a constituent in his district and by accounts given, a strict constructionist. The term began to be used by conservative and moderate Republican presidents beginning with Richard Nixon in 1968 when he was running for election. His pledge was to appoint justices that interpret the law and reinstate "law and order" to the judiciary. President Nixon appointed four justices that seemed to be of that philosophy. One of them, Harry Blackmun, however, shifted leftward, while another, Lewis F. Powell, became a moderate. The other two were in the mold of what most think of in terms of strict constructionists. Gerald Ford, when running to serve a full term of his own distanced himself from this issue. Ronald Reagan, however, also promised "Strict Constructionists". All three of his US Supreme Court nominees loosely fell into this category. Still one was more of an originalist while the other two were fairly conservative. Every major Republican candidate since Reagan has promised to nominate only strict constructionists for the US Supreme Court and mostly such judges for other federal courts.
Criticisms
The term has been criticized as being a misleading or meaningless term. Few judges self-identify as strict constructionists, due to the narrow meaning of the term. Antonin Scalia, the justice most identified with the term, once wrote: "I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be", calling the philosophy "a degraded form of textualism that brings the whole philosophy into disrepute". Scalia summarized his textualist approach as follows: "A text should not be construed strictly, and it should not be construed leniently; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means." He continued with one real case to differentiate them:
Doctrine of absurdity
Constitutional scholar John Hart Ely believed that "strict constructionism" is not really a philosophy of law or a theory of interpretation, but a coded label for judicial decisions popular with a particular political party. In law, strictly literal interpretations of statutes can lead one to logically deduce absurdities, and the doctrine of absurdity is that commonsense interpretations should be used in such cases, rather than literal reading of a law or of original intent. The absurdity doctrine is a doctrine in legal theory, also known as "scrivener's error exception"; in which American courts have interpreted statutes contrary to their plain meaning in order to avoid absurd legal conclusions. It has been described as follows:
