Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism

Significance

The transition from deference to authority to autonomous reasoning is a major landmark in moral development. In this light, it is interesting how citizens and especially legal experts often heed the letter of the law in detriment of their moral standards during judicial decision making. Despite substantial cultural variability in this phenomenon, our study documented a global tendency toward such “textualist” interpretation and provided an explanation for why it might prevail: prioritizing the letter of the law over its spirit helps citizens and judges reach a shared understanding of law's scope, which plausibly brings about long-term social benefits and outweighs the occasional moral cost of adopting a textualist strategy.

Abstract

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges.