Jonathan R. Siegel

Professor of Law

George Washington University

76 Brook. L. Rev. 1019 (2011) (symposium)

Textualist interpreters are becoming increasingly radical as they gradually realize that the accommodations they previously allowed in order to reach sensible results are inconsistent with fundamental textualist premises. This trend has resulted in the creation of a "naive textualism," which is distinguished by its naive attitude that statutes can be best understood by simply looking up their words in a dictionary, applying a few canons of statutory construction, and eschewing other considerations. The Supreme Court recently provided an excellent example of naive textualism in the field of patent law. For decades, patent law was a paradigm of richly contextualized statutory interpretaiton, but in a recent case the Court looked to little more than the dictionary in deciding fundamentally important questions of patent law. This essay outlines the Court’s shift from a richly contextual approach to a naively textualist approach to statutory interpretation in patent law and discusses why courts should avoid naive textualism.