As a normative theory, legal formalists argue that judges and other public officials should be constrained in their interpretation of legal texts, suggesting that investing the judiciary with the power to say what the law "should" be, rather than confining them to expositing what the law "does" say, violates the separation of powers. This argument finds its most eloquent expression in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, which provides that the judiciary "shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them; to the end Massachusetts' government may be a government of laws, and not of men". Formalism seeks to maintain that separation as a "theory that law is a set of rules and principles independent of other political and social institutions".