DotW is Old Textualism, New Juristocracy by Marco Basile. Here is the abstract:
This Article traces the emergence of text-centric theories of legal interpretation in the early nineteenth century amid an increasingly writing-based legal culture. While many scholars and judges associate textualism with the Founding period’s enactment of written constitutions and innovation in the separation of powers, this Article argues that the first “textualist” turn in legal interpretation crystallized after the Founding and reflected transnational developments. Not until the 1830s through 1850s did certain jurists on both sides of the Atlantic elaborate interpretive theories predicated on understanding a written law as an ordinary linguistic communication, as opposed to being in part declaratory of unwritten principles. This new emphasis on the enacted text reflected the increasingly writing-based legal culture of the early nineteenth century enabled by the industrial revolution in print and communication technologies. Amid this technological change, old textualism turned out to be different from the new textualism. New textualism emphasizes the public legibility of the enacted text and how that public legibility operates to constrain judicial discretion. Old textualism, by contrast, understood law as a largely technical language and instead promoted a vision of legal interpretation that advanced public ends through non-public means. Old textualists ultimately sought to claim interpretation as the expertise of judges and to reassure skeptics that judges could exercise this expertise objectively—laying groundwork for the rise of judicial supremacy that would follow.
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