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Construction And Constraint: Discussion Of Living Originalism, Lawrence B. Solum
Construction And Constraint: Discussion Of Living Originalism, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Jack Balkin's Living Originalism raises many important questions about contemporary constitutional theory. Can and should liberals and progressives embrace originalism? Can the New Deal expansion of national legislative power be given originalist foundations? Is there a plausible originalist case for a right to reproductive autonomy and hence for the Court's decision in Roe v. Wade? Is the fact of theoretical disagreement among originalists evidence for the thesis that the originalist project is in disarray?
Originalism And Constitutional Construction, Lawrence B. Solum
Originalism And Constitutional Construction, Lawrence B. Solum
Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works
Constitutional interpretation is the activity that discovers the communicative content or linguistic meaning of the constitutional text. Constitutional construction is the activity that determines the legal effect given the text, including doctrines of constitutional law and decisions of constitutional cases or issues by judges and other officials. The interpretation-construction distinction, frequently invoked by contemporary constitutional theorists and rooted in American legal theory in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, marks the difference between these two activities.
This article advances two central claims about constitutional construction. First, constitutional construction is ubiquitous in constitutional practice. The central warrant for this claim is conceptual: …