Renowned Scholar Stanley Fish Discusses the Interpretation of Text

Allison Pruitt, Office of Communications and Public Relations, University of Georgia School of Law

Published in The Advocate, Spring/Summer 2006, Vol. 40, No. 2

Abstract

Textualists – those who interpret the law or the Constitution by determining what its text meant when the statute or law was ratified – are wrong. The only true meaning of any text is the meaning that its author intends, according to Stanley Fish, a nationally recognized legal and literary scholar, who delivered the 101st Sibley Lecture at the University of Georgia School of Law in March 2006.