Legal formalists seek certainty and clarity in law. Formalism can take several jurisprudential forms: a preference for bright-line rules over more flexible legal standards, belief that legal decisions never require recourse to nonlegal materials, or belief that every legal decision has a single right answer. In the United States, formalism was a dominant view between the Civil War and the New Deal, but then disappeared until the 1980s, when it reemerged in the hands of conservative jurists advocating originalism in constitutional law and textualism in statutory interpretation.
