The new book, “Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts,” is lucid and accessible, though only the name of one of its authors makes it of interest to the general reader. It is basically a contribution to the field of “statutory construction,” and it is mostly a series of short essays elaborating on principles meant to guide lawyers and judges in interpreting law and other legal texts. Lawyers call these principles canons of construction.

For instance: “Words must be given the meaning they had when the text was adopted.”

Or, and perhaps more interesting: “A statute presumptively has no extraterritorial application.” This will please the defendants in a case to be reargued next term on the question of whether foreign oil companies may be sued under a federal law for complicity in human rights abuses abroad.

Or: “The word person includes corporations and other entities, but not the sovereign.”

The First Amendment rights of corporations figured in the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United, but Justice Scalia’s point here concerns statutes and not the Constitution. He does mention Citizens United in passing, commenting that the law it overturned had called for fast judicial review. That was an indication, Justice Scalia says, that Congress knew the law was of “questionable constitutionality.”

Another canon may bear on the other blockbuster case still in the Supreme Court pipeline, the administration’s challenge to a tough Arizona immigration law on the ground that it conflicts with federal immigration laws and policies. That canon says that “a federal statute is presumed to supplement rather than displace state law.”

In general, Justice Scalia writes, it is the words of the text under consideration that must be at the center of legal inquiry. Other sources and values — the intentions of those who wrote the words or the consequences of a given interpretation — are, he writes, illegitimate.

To show that textualism is a neutral principle rather than “a technique for achieving ideological ends,” Justice Scalia lists some of the opinions he has written and joined that, thanks to a textualist approach, are at odds with his policy preferences as “a confessed law-and-order social conservative.”