At the Federalist Society convention in November, the White House counsel said, reportedly to everyone's delight, that “the Trump administration's philosophy on judging can be summarized in two words: 'originalism' and 'textualism.'” And no wonder everyone was delighted, because judges who are strict textualists reach politically conservative results—overwhelmingly. The evidence proves it.

Textualism, the theory of interpretation espoused by the late Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Neil Gorsuch, and many other state and federal judges, focuses intensely on the words and syntax of a law to decide cases. Other considerations—legislative history, the law's broader purpose, judicial intuition, sensible policy, a decision's real-world consequences—matter much less and sometimes not at all.

Supposedly, textualism shows the proper deference to what the legislature says and thus curbs judicial overreaching. Supposedly, textualism is neutral, objective, nonideological—a simple exercise in rule-of-law judging. But as textualism is actually practiced, it fits neither of those descriptions.

That is the conclusion of one study after another. A number of them center on the opinions of Scalia, the pre-eminent advocate of textualism and its cousin, originalism (which seeks to uncover the original public meaning of constitutional language). And the studies all show—if it even needed proving—an unmistakable ideological bent in his opinions.

For instance, professor Geoffrey Stone polled colleagues to identify the 20 most important Supreme Court cases between 2000 and 2013. In every one, Scalia voted for the conservative position. And Stone noted that Scalia's judicial philosophy “in no way” explains that voting record. It was “determined first and foremost by [his] own personal policy preferences.”

To take a state-court example, I reviewed overrulings of settled precedent by the textualist majority on the Michigan Supreme Court between 2000 and 2015. Those justices had all been appointed by a Republican governor or nominated by the Republican Party. In 81 overrulings—itself a remarkable number—the justices reached a conservative result 78 times. That's an ideology rating of 96.3 percent, a number that cannot be rationalized by any jurisprudence that's evenhanded.

Again, the studies only confirm what is pretty obvious to anyone familiar with the decision-making of self-described textualists, especially in significant cases. Textualism has become a brand name for politically driven judging.

You can often recognize the textualist brand by high-sounding pronouncements like these in opinions:

• We begin, as we must, with a careful examination of the statutory language.

• Ascertaining the plain/ordinary meaning of [some word or phrase] is of critical importance to our analysis.

• The proper role of the judiciary is to apply, not amend, the work of the People's representatives.

You can also recognize the brand by laborious parsing in a futile effort to resolve intractable ambiguity; by overreliance on highly malleable and often conflicting so-called canons of construction (last antecedent, series qualifier, ejusdem generis, surplusage, ordinary meaning); and by a propensity to conclude that the “plain language” of a statute compels such and such a result. Judges of all dispositions use and abuse the notion of “plain language,” but textualists more than others exaggerate the number of cases in which the text alone yields a singular or self-evident meaning.

One other sign of the textualist brand is this: a habitual resort to dictionaries for the meanings of contested words. Never mind that most legislative drafters—the professionals who write laws—rarely consult dictionaries in their work. Plucking from among dictionary definitions to decide cases is misguided as a matter of language theory: It equates a word's meaning in a particular instance with the conditions, or properties, in an isolated definition, rather than looking to the contextual patterns that the word commonly appears in. One dictionary editor has said that judges' reliance on dictionaries is “probably wrong, in almost all situations” (Jesse Sheidlower, former editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary).

What's more, judges' actual performance in using dictionaries has been dismal. To again take just one of the many studies, professors James J. Brudney and Lawrence Baum found that the Supreme Court's use of dictionaries is “strikingly ad hoc and subjective”; that justices tend to “cherry-pick definitions that support results reached on other grounds”; and that “the image of dictionary usage as authoritative … is little more than a mirage.”

The legal world would be better off if judges did not tilt one way or another, liberal or conservative. But they do now and always have: Judges are influenced by their backgrounds and worldviews. Textualists, though, seem particularly unwilling to acknowledge that truth, or concede that their interpretive theory is just as pliable as others, or own up to the one-sided record it has produced in cases that shape the law. Theirs is a convenient and persistent blindness.

Correction: An earlier version of this column misidentified the professors associated with the study of the Supreme Court's use of dictionaries. The professors are James J. Brudney and Lawrence Baum.

Joseph Kimble is a distinguished professor emeritus at WMU-Cooley Law School and the author of three books on legal writing. He is senior editor of The Scribes Journal of Legal Writing and the longtime editor of the “Plain Language” column in the Michigan Bar Journal. He also writes an editing column called “Redlines” for Judicature.