The Wikipedia produces its explanation of "Originalism". It is one of their most biased offerings. It is something that The Guardian does not like [ the Originalism rather than the bias ] - see Antonin Scalia the judge whose conservatism shaped America for their position.
It chooses to allege that Antonin Scalia opposed the liberal position, which claimed that America has a Living Constitution; that liberals QUOTE saw the Constitution as an evolving set of rules that could be adapted to changing values and times UNQUOTE. This can be fairly paraphrased as:
We will claim that the Constitution means whatever we want it to mean.
This matters because the American Supreme Court can and does put any interpretation on the law that it fancies.
Antonin Scalia didn't just accept Originalism. He also believed in Textualism, which even the Wikipedia concedes, begrudgingly is the theory that words mean what they say as distinct from whatever version lawyers choose claim for them. Notice that the Wiki complains about Antonin Scalia using "scathing language". He understood bad law and bad judgements when he saw them. Why not say so?
The Guardian, a Marxist propaganda machine wants lawyers to abuse their power, to make America into a Socialist state whence the bias in their article at http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/14/antonin-scalia-america-supreme-court-judge-us-constitution
Antonin Scalia ex Wiki
Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 12/13, 2016)[8] was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. Appointed to the Court by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, Scalia was described as the intellectual anchor for the originalist and and textualist position in the Court's conservative wing.[9]Scalia was born in Trenton, New Jersey. He attended public grade school, Xavier High School in Manhattan, and then college at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. He obtained his law degree from Harvard Law School and spent six years in a Cleveland law firm, before he became a law school professor at the University of Virginia. In the early 1970s, he served in the Nixon and Ford administrations, eventually as an Assistant Attorney General. He spent most of the Carter years teaching at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the first faculty advisers of the fledgling Federalist Society. In 1982, Ronald Reagan appointed him as judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.[10] In 1986, Reagan appointed him to the Supreme Court. Scalia was asked few difficult questions by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate, becoming the first Italian-American justice.[11]
Scalia served on the Court for nearly thirty years, during which time he espoused a conservative jurisprudence and ideology, advocating textualism in statutory interpretation and originalism in constitutional interpretation. He was a strong defender of the powers of the executive branch, believing presidential power should be paramount in many areas. He opposed affirmative action and other policies that treated minorities as special groups. He filed separate opinions in many cases and often castigated the Court's majority in his minority opinions using scathing language.
Textualism ex Wiki
Textualism is a formalist theory of the interpretation of law, holding that a legal text's ordinary meaning should govern its interpretation, as opposed to inquiries into non-textual sources such as the intention of the legislature in passing the law, the problem it was intended to remedy, or substantive questions of the justice and rectitude of the law.[1]In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a principle of interpretation that views the Constitution's meaning as fixed as of the time of enactment. The originalist enterprise, then, is a quest to determine the meaning of the utterances, the meaning of which cannot change except through formal amendment.[1] The term originated in the 1980s[2] but the concept is an application of formalist theory and closely related to textualism when it is applied to meaning.
Today, originalism is popular among some political conservatives in the U.S., and is most prominently associated with Justice Clarence Thomas, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, and the late Robert Bork. However, some liberals, such as Justice Hugo Black and Akhil Amar, have also subscribed to the theory.[3]
Originalism is an umbrella term for interpretative methods that hold to the "fixation thesis"—the notion that an utterance's semantic content is fixed at the time it is uttered.[4] There are two broad sources of meaning that originalists seek:
- The original intent theory, which holds that interpretation of a written constitution is (or should be) consistent with what was meant by those who drafted and ratified it. This is currently a minority view among originalists.
- The original meaning theory, which is closely related to textualism, is the view that interpretation of a written constitution or law should be based on what reasonable persons living at the time of its adoption would have declared the ordinary meaning of the text to be. It is this view with which most originalists, such as Justice Scalia, are associated.
These theories share the view that there is an identifiable original intent or original meaning, contemporaneous with a constitution's or statute's ratification, which should govern its subsequent interpretation. The divisions between these theories relate to what exactly that identifiable original intent or original meaning is: the intentions of the authors or the ratifiers, the original meaning of the text, a combination of the two, or the original meaning of the text but not its expected application.