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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Popular Constitutionalism And Relaxing The Dead Hand: Can The People Be Trusted?, Todd E. Pettys
Popular Constitutionalism And Relaxing The Dead Hand: Can The People Be Trusted?, Todd E. Pettys
Todd E. Pettys
A growing number of constitutional scholars are urging the nation to rethink its commitment to judicial supremacy. Popular constitutionalists argue that the American people, not the courts, hold the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution’s many open-ended provisions whose meanings are reasonably contestable. This Article defends popular constitutionalism on two important fronts. First, using originalism as a paradigmatic example of the ways in which courts frequently draw constitutional meaning from sources rooted deep in the past, the Article contends that defenders of judicial supremacy still have not persuasively responded to the familiar dead-hand query: Why should constitutional meanings that prevailed …
Interpretation, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Interpretation, Francis J. Mootz Iii
Scholarly Works
In this chapter from "Law and the Humanities: An Introduction," published by Cambridge University Press, I first survey various theoretical approaches to interpretation, including natural law, analytical legal positivism, law as communication (originalism, intentionalism, and new textualism), and the hermeneutical turn. I then discuss the role of interpretation in contract law, statutory law and constitutional law, to situate the theories in practice.