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X-Citement Video, 513 U.S. 64 (1994) (Scalia, J., dissenting): I have been willing, in the case of civil statutes, to acknowledge a doctrine of "scrivener's error" that permits a court to give an unusual (though not unheard-of) meaning to a word which, if given its normal meaning, would produce an absurd and arguably unconstitutional result.
For the purpose of resolving this issue, courts have developed canons of interpretation. The rule of lenity is one such canon. The rule of lenity is one such canon. Implicit in its provisions is the additional burden placed on the prosecution in a criminal case and the protection of individual rights against the powers of the state.
As a result of this distinction, nearly all textualists reject strict constructionism in this sense. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a major proponent of textualism, said that "no one ought to be" a strict constructionist, because the most literal interpretation meaning of a text can conflict with the commonly-understood or original ...
The ambiguity in a locally ambiguous sentence briefly stays and is resolved, i.e., disambiguated, by the end of the speech. Sometimes, local ambiguities can result in "garden path" sentences, in which a structurally correct sentence is difficult to interpret because one interpretation of the ambiguous region is not the one that makes most sense.
On a sentence level, the principle claims that what remains if one removes the lexical parts of a meaningful sentence, are the rules of composition. The sentence "Socrates was a man", for example, becomes "S was a M" once the meaningful lexical items—"Socrates" and "man"—are taken away.
Textualism is a formalist theory in which the interpretation of the law is based exclusively on the ordinary meaning of the legal text, where no consideration is given to non-textual sources, such as intention of the law when passed, the problem it was intended to remedy, or significant questions regarding the justice or rectitude of the law.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
Original intent is a theory in law concerning constitutional and statutory interpretation. It is frequently used as a synonym for originalism; while original intent is one theory in the originalist family, it has some salient differences which has led originalists from more predominant schools of thought such as original meaning to distinguish original intent as much as legal realists do.