Originalism, a wobbly method of constitutional interpretation promoted by jurists, such as Justice Antonin Scalia, has gained a st
ronger foothold among conservatives, especially in academia, but continues to be derided by historians, writes Saul Cornell in a piece for Dissent Magazine.
“When most historians look closely at originalist arguments, what they usually find is bad history shaped to fit an ideological agenda – what historians derisively call ‘law office history,’” Cornell writes.
Cornell, history professor at Fordham University and a senior research scholar at Yale Law School, details a rocky path for originalism, from its development during the Reagan years as a tool to reign in so-called activists judges to today’s “new originalists,” who have prospered thanks to “right-wing scholars, judges, and generous support from the Federalist Society, the wealthy conservative legal group that has become a farm team for conservative judges and academics.”
The “goal of new originalism is not to constrain judges, but to empower them to further the agenda of conservatives,” Cornell continues.
But despite their claim to be devoted to understanding the original meaning of the Constitution’s framers, the new originalists are actually either ignorant or dismissive of history. As Cornell points out, the framers were not monolithic in their views about the Constitution or constitutional interpretation.
Cornell writes:
John Yoo, a prominent new originalist legal scholar who helped to frame the Bush administration’s novel views on torture, goes even further in circumventing historical understandings of the Constitution. (The Founders, it is worth recalling, were strong supporters of the principle of international law and took a dim view of torture.) For Yoo, the actual history of the Founding era poses few constraints on the modern lawyer or judge. Yoo accomplishes this sleight of hand by ignoring the conflicts and disagreements among the Founders. If one ignores those conflicts, one can cherry-pick evidence to construct whatever theory one likes. Most historians would point out that the Founding era was not only characterized by conflicts within the elite, such as the argument between Jefferson and Hamilton, but also an even more basic conflict between elites and ordinary Americans. Yoo and other new originalists not only ignore the tensions within the elite, they assume that common people in the Founding era lacked the knowledge necessary to understand the Constitution and played no role in the constitutional history of the period. (Yoo clearly did not bother to look at the Pennsylvania Constitution, newspapers from the period, or any text written by ordinary Americans.)
For more on constitutional interpretation see Keeping Faith With the Constitution, by Pamela S. Karlan, Goodwin Liu and Christopher H. Schroeder.
s book, Decision Points, Bush says he had no problem approving the waterboarding of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush writes that when asked by the CIA whether it could use waterboarding in its interrogations of Mohammed, he replied "Damn right."
"His silent presence on the bench has evolved into a weirdly compelling example of performance art," 