Despite the widespread assumption that legal interpretation seeks linguistic meaning, many prominent and influential theories of legal interpretation – including purposivism, some forms of intentionalism, Ronald Dworkin’s theory, and pragmatism – do not make any kind of linguistic meaning the focus of their inquiry, though this fact is often obscured by confusions about the nature of linguistic meaning as well as claims by the advocates of the theories. (See sections 3 and 4.) In fact, as we will see (section 4.2), there is a good case that even contemporary textualism is not best understood as trying to ascertain linguistic meaning.