Strict Sense of The Term
Strict construction requires a judge to apply the text only as it is spoken. Once the court has a clear meaning of the text, no further investigation is required. Judges should avoid drawing inferences from a statute or constitution and focus only on the text itself. Justice Hugo Black argued that the First Amendment's injunction, that Congress shall make no law (against certain civil rights), should be construed strictly: no law, thought Black, admits no exceptions. Ironically, Black's legacy is as a judicial activist. However, "strict construction" is not a synonym for textualism or originalism, and many adherents of the latter two philosophies are thus misidentified as "strict constructionists."
The term is often contrasted with the phrase "judicial activism," used to describe judges who seek to enact legislation through court rulings, although the two terms are not actually opposites.
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Famous quotes containing the words strict sense, strict, sense and/or term:
“We know what boredom is: it is a dull
Impatience or a fierce velleity,
A champing wish, stalled by our lassitude,
To make or do. In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:”
—Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
“In a universe that is all gradations of matter, from gross to fine to finer, so that we end up with everything we are composed of in a lattice, a grid, a mesh, a mist, where particles or movements so small we cannot observe them are held in a strict and accurate web, that is nevertheless nonexistent to the eyes we use for ordinary living—in this system of fine and finer, where then is the substance of a thought?”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“In one sense it is evident that the art of kingship does include the art of lawmaking. But the political ideal is not full authority for laws but rather full authority for a man who understands the art of kingship and has kingly ability.”
—Plato (428–348 B.C.)
“Why did you give no hint that night
That quickly after the morrow’s dawn,
And calmly, as if indifferent quite,
You would close your term here, up and be gone”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)