This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. At his confirmation hearing, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts compared his role to that of an umpire in baseball: “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” In practice, however, the modern-day Supreme Court has an inordinate amount of leeway in choosing …
Get your tickets for Amicus Live in Washington DC here. This week they’re trying to understand the mechanisms of what Professor Saul Cornell calls “the originalism industrial complex” and how those mechanisms plug into the highest court in the land. They’re also asking how and why liberals failed to find an effective answer to originalism, even as the various “originalist” …
This is part of How Originalism Ate the Law, a Slate series about the legal theory that ruined everything. And that’s because the whole nation is currently lashed to a small, stupid, perpetually changing theory of legal interpretation variously known as “originalism,” or “textualism,” or “original public meaning,” or “history and tradition.” A theory that is—unless you were born in …
