The rule that a statute is to be interpreted in accordance with its plain meaning is ordinarily defended as a proposition about language: words possess established senses, the legislature employed them, and a reader who departs from those senses is substituting his own preferences for the enactment. Presented that way the rule is vulnerable to challenge, and it has been challenged for a century. Words do not possess established senses independent of context; the same phrase means different things in a tax statute and a planning statute; and anyone who has read a difficult provision knows that plain meaning is the designation one gives the interpretation one has already reached.
The challenges land, and the rule withstands them, which suggests that the defence has been misdescribing it. What the rule allocates is not meaning but authority. A court permitted to go behind the text whenever the text seems awkward has acquired an authority to determine, among several available readings, the one the legislature ought to have intended. It will exercise that authority on materials -- committee reports, ministerial statements, its own sense of the mischief -- that were never voted on by anybody. The plain-meaning rule restricts the court to the one document that was.
So understood, the rule does not necessitate the fiction of verbal precision. It requires only that where the text will bear an interpretation, the court take it, and that the court say so when the text will not. That is a rule about what institution decides, and it is answerable to institutional arguments rather than to linguistic ones. Whether a legislature can be expected to articulate what it means, whether committee materials are dependable evidence of anything, whether a court that departs from text in difficult cases will confine itself to difficult cases -- these are the questions that determine whether the rule stands or falls, and none of them is about semantics.
The reframing explains a pattern that the linguistic account leaves puzzling. Judges in sharp disagreement about language are often in agreement about plain meaning, and judges in agreement about language often disagree. What predicts a judge's position is not his conception of how words operate but his conception of how much a court should decide, which is precisely what the institutional account would predict and the linguistic account would not.
Furthermore, it explains why the rule is stated most emphatically in the cases where the result is least attractive. A court applying a text that generates an outcome nobody intended, and acknowledging as much in the course of applying it, is not being obtuse. It is declining an invitation to legislate, and doing so in the only manner perceptible to the legislature, which can then correct the text if it chooses. The uncomfortable case is the rule working, not the rule failing.
