In the late 1960s, when conservatives felt that the Warren court was tilting too far to the left, magicking up in their opinions a Constitution that did not exist, Robert Bork, the patriarch of originalism, took a revelatory position: The Constitution should be interpreted in the ways intended by the people who wrote it. But in Rahimi, five conservative justices …
This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. What’s remarkable is who seized on this squabble over intellectual property to launch a scathing salvo against the conservative majority’s “laser-like focus” on “supposed history and tradition”: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative who presented as a true believer in originalism when joining …
Federal judges are not historians, but they are increasingly obligated to play them on the bench. In his Bruen decision last June, Justice Clarence Thomas ordered courts to assess the constitutionality of modern-day gun restrictions by searching for “historical analogues” from 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Judges based their decisions on those scraps without further research, following Thomas’ …
