Abstract: In 1946, William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley argued, in their classic essay, “The Intentional Fallacy,” that critics interpreting a literary work should cast aside pursuit of the author’s intent. “The poem belongs to the public,” they wrote, because “it is embodied in language, the peculiar possession of the public.” The New Criticism, a movement that dominated the academic study of literature in mid-century, asserted that only close analysis of the words and structure of the text—not external knowledge about the author, politics, morality, or a reader’s feelings—was the key to understanding its meaning. Salvatore Eugene Scalia, a professor of Italian literature at Brooklyn College, was an adherent of this theory. He also advocated for “literalness” in reading and translation, to avoid “yielding to the temptation” to follow one’s own language’s conventions in interpreting the words of the text. The New Criticism fell from prominence in the nineteen-eighties, but its impact became discernible in another field, through Professor Scalia’s only child, who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1986, the same year that the elder Scalia died. Justice Antonin Scalia became the country’s most important expositor of textualism, the influential method of legal interpretation wherein “the text is the law, and it is the text that must be observed,” regardless of what lawmakers may have intended in passing the law. Since the nineteen-eighties, textualism has been favored by legal conservatives—but, in more recent decades, its focus on the words of a text has become influential with liberal judges, too. Last Monday, under the shadow of Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, the current conservative Justices aired their strife over his textualist legacy in Bostock v. Clayton County, a landmark gay-and-transgender-rights case.