Worse Than Nothing: The Dangerous Fallacy of Originalism

Why originalism is a flawed, incoherent, and dangerously ideological method of constitutional interpretation



Originalism, the view that the meaning of a constitutional provision is fixed when it is adopted, was once the fringe theory of a few extremely conservative legal scholars but is now a well-accepted mode of constitutional interpretation. Three of the Supreme Court's nine justices explicitly embrace the originalist approach, as do increasing numbers of judges in the lower courts.



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