Formalism has an austere elegance. It appeals to people like G. H. Hardy, Antonin Scalia, and me, who relish that feeling of a nice rigid theory shut tight against contradiction. But it’s not easy to hold to principles like this consistently, and it’s not clear it’s even wise. Even Justice Scalia has occasionally conceded that when the literal words of the law seem to require an absurd judgment, the literal words have to be set aside in favor of a reasonable guess as to what Congress must have meant.
