Given textualism’s emphasis on text and objective meaning, it would be natural to understand it as seeking semantic content.[25] This cannot be the right understanding of contemporary textualism, however. Leading textualists explicitly reject literal meaning (a rough synonym for semantic content), which they associate with the more traditional “plain meaning” textualism. They insist that textualism seeks a reasonable reading in context, not a literal one (Scalia 1997, 23–24; Easterbrook 1994, 64, 67; Manning 2001, 108–15; 2003, 2457–58; 2006, 79–81; see also Whittington 1999a, 176–77). As Justice Scalia puts it: “A text should not be construed strictly…; it should be construed reasonably, to contain all that it fairly means” (Scalia 1997, 23).