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An Originalist Defense Of Substantive Due Process: Magna Carta, Higher-Law Constitutionalism, And The Fifth Amendment, Frederick Mark Gedicks
An Originalist Defense Of Substantive Due Process: Magna Carta, Higher-Law Constitutionalism, And The Fifth Amendment, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Faculty Scholarship
A longstanding scholarly consensus holds that the Due Process Clause of the FifthAmendment protects only rights to legal process. Both this consensus and the occasional challenges to it have generally overlooked the interpretive significance of the classical natural law tradition that made substantive due process textually coherent, andthe emergence of public-meaning originalism as the dominant approach to constitutional interpretation. This Article fills those gaps.
One widely shared understanding of the Due Process Clause in the late eighteenth century encompassed judicial recognition of unenumerated substantive rights as a limit on congressional power. This concept of substantive due process originated in Sir …
Conservatives, Liberals, Romantics: The Persistent Quest For Certainty In Constitutional Interpretation, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Conservatives, Liberals, Romantics: The Persistent Quest For Certainty In Constitutional Interpretation, Frederick Mark Gedicks
Faculty Scholarship
Despite their considerable ideological differences, "conservative originalists" such as Robert Bork and "progressive originalists" such as Michael Perry both divide the process of understanding into cognitive (or "objective") and normative (or "subjective") aspects. The determination of the original meaning of the Constitution is methodologically separated from the question how this predetermined meaning should be applied in a particular case. This places both conservative and progressive originalists squarely in the tradition of Romantic hermeneutics, which sought to overcome the uncertainty and imprecision of textual interpretation by developing a "science of interpretation" which purported to be as epistemologically reliable as the methods …