In his recent book, A Matter of Interpretation,' Justice Antonin Scalia describes and argues for his textualist approach to statutory interpretation. Scalia's essay comes at an interesting time, for it has now been more than a decade since he joined the Supreme Court and began advocating for an approach to statutory interpretation very much (but not exactly) like the one he describes in his book. In this Article, I argue that the textualist approach has not been successful, and has begun losing influence with the other members of the Court. The crux of my argument is that Scalia writes convincingly, both in his book and in his opinions, about why one would want to approach interpretation with such deference to the text. But because the textualist approach is based on an insufficiently sophisticated understanding of the human language faculty, it fails, regardless of how much 'one may agree with the considerations that motivate it.
