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Selling Originalism Columbia Law School Scholarship Archive Faculty Scholarship Faculty Publications 2009 Selling Originalism Jamal Greene Columbia Law School, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Jamal Greene, Selling Originalism, 97 GEO. L. J. 657 (2009). Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/674 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Publications at Scholarship Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of Scholarship Archive. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ARTICLES Selling Originalism JAMAL GREENE* TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ................................................... 658 I. ORIGINALISM AND ITS DETRACTORS ........................ 661 A. WHOSE ORIGINALISM? . .. 661 B. WHY ORIGINALISMM? . 664 C. WHY NOT ORIGINALISM?. ................................... 665 D. NEW ORIGINALISM ................................. 670 II. POPULAR ORIGINALISM ...................................... 672 A. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORIGINALISM ....................... 674 B. ORIGINALISM IN PRACTICE .................................... 682 C. THE SALIENCE OF METHODOLOGY ................... ..... 690 Ill. ORIGINALISM AS NON-ORIGINALIST .............................. 696 A. CONSTITUTIONAL PRACTICE AS CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY ......... 697 B. THE MARKET FOR METHODOLOGIES ...................... 702 c. TESTING THE MARKET (METAPHOR) ...................... 704 D. SELLING ORIGINALISM ............................... 708 1. Simplicity ................................... 708 * Associate Professor of Law, Columbia Law School; Yale Law School, J.D. 2005; Harvard University, A.B. 1999. © 2009, Jamal Greene. This Article has benefited incalculably from the insights of far too many people to name, but I am particularly indebted to Kate Andrias, Nicholas Bagley, Jack Balkin, Guido Calabresi, John Coyle, Joshua Dugan, Stephen Ellman, Cynthia Esflund, Barry Fried- man, Chad Golder, Mark Graber, Abner Greene, Sherrilyn Ifill, Samuel Issacharoff, Dan Kahan, Ralf Michaels, Trevor Morrison, Elora Mukherjee, Burt Neuborne, Brandon Paradise, Nathaniel Persily, Robert Post, Theodore Ruger, Neil Siegel, Reva Siegel, William Treanor, Benjamin Zipursky, and workshop participants at the University of Alabama School of Law, the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the University of Chicago Law School, Columbia Law School, Duke Law School, Fordham Law School, the University of Maryland School of Law, New York Law School, New York University School of Law, the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Stanford Law School, and Washington College of Law. THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 97:657 2. Populism .................................... 711 3. N ativism ................................... 713 'E. SELLING ORIGINALISM? .............................. 714 IV. ORIGINALISM'S LESSONS ............................... 716 CONCLUSION ............................................ 719 INTRODUCTION Justice Scalia has described an originalist approach to interpretation as a prerequisite to faithful application of a written Constitution. If, says he, constitu- tional judicial review is implicit in the notion that the Constitution is paramount law, as has been settled in this country at least since Marbury v. Madison,1 then that review must be guided by the ordinary tools of legislative interpretation.2 In a democracy, serious legislative interpretation requires that judges keep faith with the meaning of the text as understood at the time of enactment, not as desired by those judges or by anyone else who does not, in the relevant way, represent the will of the People. To pledge allegiance to the understandings or the will of contemporary majorities-or, worse, of contemporary judges-is to subvert the aim of higher lawmaking. "The purpose of constitutional guaran- tees," Justice Scalia has written, "is precisely to prevent the law from reflecting certain changes in original values that the society adopting the Constitution thinks fundamentally undesirable. 3 A substantial number of legal academics regard this as hogwash. For one thing, Justice Scalia's writings on constitutional interpretation reflect a restless fixation on what is, to many, a false dichotomy. Non-originalists do not gener- ally imagine themselves to be making up constitutional meaning as they go4 along, or even to be seeking "the desirable result for the case at hand.", Whether or not interpretive constraints other than original meaning are more difficult to apply and discern, there is no reason beyond Justice Scalia's own (formidable) imaginings to think them less constraining. Nor does rejecting the supremacy of the framing .generation's understanding of the import and limita- tions of the Constitution's language portend the interpretive paralysis that Justice Scalia supposes it does.5 At the very least, it does so no more than his "time-dated" version of originalism, 6 which compels judges to engage in an 1. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch) 137, 177 (1803). 2. Antonin Scalia, Originalism:The Lesser Evil, 57 U. CIN. L. REv. 849, 854 (1989). 3. Id. at 862. 4. Antonin Scalia, Common-Law Courts in a Civil-Law System: The Role of United States Federal Courts in Interpretingthe Constitution and Laws, in A MATrER OF Im.mREATION: FEDERAL COURTS AND THE LAW 3, 39 (Amy Gutmann ed., 1997). 5. Scalia, supra note 2, at 855; see also Scalia, supra note 4, at 44-46. 6. See Antonin Scalia, Response, in A MArER OF INTERPRETATION: FEDERAL CouRTS AND THE LAW 129, 147-49 (Amy Gutmann ed., 1997). 2009] SELLING ORIGINALISM often contentious and indeterminate historical examination that is beyond their institutional competence. And if democratic legitimacy is the measure of a sound constitutional interpretive practice,7 then Justice Scalia needs an account of why and how rote obedience to the commitments of voters two centuries distant and wildly different in racial, ethnic, sexual, and cultural composition can be justified on democratic grounds. The proposition that, absent open revolution, we may change an ancient Constitution only through the onerous and constitutionally endogenous Article V process is both undemocratic and unattractive. Whatever its theoretical shortcomings, however, originalism in practice is at least as healthy today as it was when Justice Scalia joined the Court in 1986. Arguments from original intent or original meaning are a prominent feature of both our legal practice and our constitutional pop culture, such as it is. The force of such arguments was dramatically in evidence in the Court's decision last Term in District of Columbia v. Heller,8 which struck down the District's handgun ban and threatens to invalidate numerous others. Not only did Justice Scalia secure five votes for the most thoroughgoing originalist opinion in the Court's history, but Justice Stevens's dissent appeared to engage rather than challenge the majority's originalist premises. 9 Perhaps the two most significant lines of criminal law cases of the last decade, those resting on Apprendi v. New Jersey'° and Crawford v. Washington," rely primarily on originalist reasoning, and on talk radio, on cable news, and in the blogosphere, originalist constitu- tional presuppositions remain vibrant. Polls report that nearly half of Americans claim to believe that the original intentions of the Constitution's authors should be the sole consideration in Supreme Court constitutional interpretation, 12 and about seven in ten believe it is "very important" for a good Supreme Court Justice to "uphold the values of those who wrote our Constitution two hundred years ago."'13 Notwithstanding its many academic critics, originalism continues to sell. Originalism's resiliency comes at a time when constitutional methodology more generally has assumed a cultural prominence it has not always enjoyed. This is not a coincidence. As others have noted, exalting originalism was part of 7. See Scalia, supra note 2, at 862. 8. District of Columbia v. Heller, 128 S. Ct. 2783 (2008). 9. See id. at 2822-47 (Stevens, J.,dissenting). 10. Apprendi v. New Jersey, 530 U.S. 466 (2000) (prohibiting increasing criminal sentences beyond the statutory minimum based on facts not submitted to a jury and proved beyond a reasonable doubt). 11. Crawford v. Washington, 541 U.S. 36 (2004) (prohibiting out-of-court testimonial statements at trial under the Confrontation Clause). 12. Press Release, Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, American Voters Oppose Same-Sex Marriage Quinnipiac University National Poll Finds, but They Don't Want Government To Ban It (July 17, 2008), http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polinglus07l72008.doc. 13. James L. Gibson & Gregory A. Caldeira, Citizens, Courts, and Confirmations: Positivity Theory and the Judgments of the American People 141, 163 tbl.4.5 (Sept. 17, 2008) (unpublished manuscript, on file with author). THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 97:657 a deliberate effort by the Reagan Justice Department to rally Americans against a Federal Judiciary it perceived as frustrating its conservative political agenda. 14 Deliberately using an interpretive methodology as a site for political mobiliza- tion was novel 15 and has contributed to heightened popular attention to "judicial philosophy" as a subject of conventional political discourse. When John Mar-
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