Perhaps surprisingly, most of the literature on legal interpretation does not consider the foundational question of legal interpretation’s constitutive aim.[2] In evaluating methods of interpretation, writers tend to appeal to whatever considerations strike them as valuable without addressing what legal interpretation is for. For example, Philip Frickey suggests that the way to evaluate purposivism is by asking “whether the interpretations that this theory produces are more worthwhile for a legal system than would be literalist or intentionalist ones” (2006, 851–52).[3]