skews13
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- Mar 18, 2017
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What do historians make of originalism? Jack Rakove, the Stanford historian and one of the foremost experts on the revolutionary era, argues that there wasn’t just one meaning of the Constitution at the time it was written and then ratified, but rather the founders had disagreements among themselves over its meaning.
He points to the great Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, who wrote that “historians can never forget that it is a debate they are interpreting.”
The inability to recognize the extent to which the Founding Fathers argued among themselves is a major flaw in the conservative case for originalism since it is dependent on the theory that people in the 18th century shared a common interpretation of the Constitution.
In fact, they did not, as one of the earliest debates over the meaning of the Constitution shows.
The Founders Would Not Recognize Originalism—Why Should We?