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@clacke

> Coming from the European legal tradition my view is that obviously the intent of any law stands above almost any nitpicking about the precise legal text, ...

We had some of that at one point. For example, I read that the Preamble to the US Constitution was once considered enforceable law, but now it is just a statement of intent.

> ... in a US legal tradition, isn't going beyond the text almost non-American?

I have always felt that Textualism was originally a technique to justify constitutional interpretations which were definitely not in the founders' minds.

Not that I'd want to return to some of their intentions. The Virginia slaveholders wrote flowery language about freedoms, but did not apply those freedoms to the people they had the most control over. That says more about their intentions than anything they wrote.

In the recent SCOTUS decision about student loans, Congress passed the HEROES act, which definitely did give some power to relieve student debt, but apparently not enough. I have read neither the decision & opinions nor the HEROES act. It might be interesting to go through them and see whether the decision was based on the act's text or its intent.

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