Wednesday, May 04, 2022

Originalism and Lived Experience

 Just a gripe here. If I understand "originalism" as a way to interpret the Constitution, it says that the Founding Fathers agreed on a document which had one meaning. (No doubt that exaggerates and distorts but it's close enough for my purposes.)

Now I've been in a lot of meetings over the years, some of which involve a group of people coming to an agreement, others involving people trying to understand the meaning of one or more speakers.  I think it's fair to say that in most cases the people who were trying to agree or who were being talked to came away from the event with somewhat different understandings.  In most cases the context was such that the differences made no long-term differences, but the principle is the same.  No group of 39 to 55 people would agree on how to apply the document resulting from their meeting. 

Original intent is a myth, an "ideal type" as some  used to say, which doesn't exist in real life.

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