Textualism in modern context is a tool used by conservative justices used to uphold laws that serve business interests and conservative causes.
No, that just highlights the hypocritical picking-and-choosing they do to justify it. Gorsuch is a textualist when he wants to be, just like the others.
Common law is basically just the US, UK, AU, and NZ. Outside the anglosphere it's mostly civil law.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_law
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_law_(legal_system)
I guess civil law gives you less room to explore ideas like "living" statutes and laws that gain and change meaning over time; if there was such a change, you'd write it down?
Regardless: whether you're a textualist or realist, in the US you're still operating in a common law system.
> What American lawyers call "textualism" is how most continental european courts interpret written laws.
They were making a direct comparison between "textualism" and civil law, but didn't include the terms. I found the comparison interesting and thought I'd make it easier for anyone else who was confused by OP's comparison.
I realize on re-reading that this comparison is much less prominent than I thought it was in OP's comment, so it makes sense that my links would seem out of place. An explicit quote of that sentence would have helped.
Another example that highlights the distinction: Justice Gorsuch, one of the Supreme Court's preeminent textualists, is also one of the biggest proponents of criminal rights. Those cases similarly involve defining the contours of pre-existing legal concepts, such as "unreasonable search or seizure." Nobody denies that such questions are subjective--in referring to what's "unreasonable," the text itself calls for a subjective analysis.