Quotes About Originalism

The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of originalism or original intent, this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting political dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end. Madison's original intention was to make all original intentions infinitely negotiable in the future.

I try to be an honest originalist! I will take the bitter with the sweet!

A 'living constitution' is a dead constitution, because it does not do the one and only thing a written constitution is supposed to do: provide parameters around the power of officials.

Those who would give us a "living" Constitution are actually giving us a dead one, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against the encroachments of government power.

Originalism is sort of subspecies of textualism. Textualism means you are governed by the text. That's the only thing that is relevant to your decision, not whether the outcome is desirable, not whether legislative history says this or that. But the text of the statute.

Originalism says that when you consult the text, you give it the meaning it had when it was adopted, not some later modern meaning.

the crucial question becomes which theory of textual interpretation is compatible with democracy. Originalism unquestionably is. Nonoriginalism, by contrast, imposes on society statutory prescriptions that were never democratically adopted.

Unlike scientific truths, which are cumulative and frequently superseded, archaisms are fixed, impervious to evidence. What is the doctrine of "the framers' original intent" and "constitutional originalism" but a variant of creationism and the denial of historical evolution

Antonin Scalia

In 1905, the Supreme Court of the United States applied the rule to the country's founding document: "The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter. That which it meant when adopted it means now.

The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead, or as I prefer to call it, enduring. It means, today, not what current society, much less the court, thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted.

I used to say that the Constitution is not a living document. It's dead, dead, dead. But I've gotten better. I no longer say that. The truth is that the Constitution is not one that morphs. It's an enduring Constitution, not a changing Constitution. That is what I've meant when I've said that the Constitution is dead.

I don't think we should have justices appointed that decide what they want to hear. It's all about the Constitution the way it was meant to be. And those are the people that I will appoint.

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.

Constitutionalism as a guiding political tendency will require careful and thoughtful development, as did jurisprudential originalism. But its wide appeal and philosophical depth make it a promising first step to a conservative future.

If we're picking people to draw out of their own conscience and experience a 'new' Constitution, we should not look principally for good lawyers. We should look to people who agree with us. When we are in that mode, you realize we have rendered the Constitution useless.

I do accept that, with - with respect to those vague terms in the Constitution such as equal protection of the laws, due process of law, cruel and unusual punishments. I fully accept that those things have to apply to new phenomena that didn't exist at the time.

I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself.

I think it's important for the American people to know that the position of originalism isn't itself an originalist position.

It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers.

A judicial activist is a judge who interprets the Constitution to mean what it would have said if he, instead of the Founding Fathers, had written it.

Having seen what the Earl Warren Court did with judicial power, Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork advocated an ethic of judicial restraint and deference to legislatures. Over time, however, conservative judges focused more and more on restraining legislatures through the courts by invalidating some laws as unconstitutional. Originalism was both a "shield" against judicial overreach and a "sword" to be used against acts of Congress.