Several of the nation’s top constitutional experts engaged in a robust discussion on what the U.S. Constitution means and how to interpret it, during the opening plenary discussion at the American Constitution Society’s Tenth Anniversary National Convention.
ACS Board Chair Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, kicked off the discussion by offering a new way of framing constitutional interpretation, as articulated in a recent article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas he coauthored with University of North Carolina law professor William Marshall, entitled “The Framers’ Constitution.”
In the article, Stone and Marshall lay out their vision for interpreting the Constitution as the Framers intended, recognizing that the Framers were “visionaries” and not “timid men” who would have viewed originalists’ vision that “any particular moment’s understanding of the meaning of the Constitution’s open-ended provisions should be locked into place” as wrongheaded.
“As men of the Enlightenment, [the Framers] believed that just as reason, observation and experience would enable us to gain greater understanding over time into questions of biology, physics, economics and human nature, so, too, would they enable us to learn more over time about the content and meaning of the broad principles they had enshrined in our Constitution,” Stone explained in his remarks.
hort term Medicaid costs, some states are slashing rates reimbursement for medical providers. But lowering rates only for low-income Medicaid beneficiaries does not drive down the cost of health care. Instead, providers just stop serving Medicaid patients and keep getting paid higher rates by everyone else. And without preventive care, beneficiaries are prone to end up seeking emergency treatment, eliminating in the long term any short term fiscal savings.
State efforts to regulate immigration have run into a rough stretch lately.
