Must We be Faithful to Original Meaning?

Abstract

I am grateful to the editors of the Jerusalem Review of Legal Studies for arranging this symposium on Living Originalism and to the contributors to this symposium for their fine essays. Living Originalism is about many things: the role of constitutional faith, the possibility of constitutional redemption, the production of democratic legitimacy through the work of political and social movements, and the processes of constitutional change. It advocates both a form of originalism and a form of living constitutionalism, and it argues that the two theories are actually two sides of the same coin. The essays in this symposium, however, focus primarily on the originalist aspects of the book; they discuss what original meaning is and why constitutional interpreters need to be faithful to it. Therefore I have organized this reply as an essay on original meaning, moving back and forth between the views of the various contributors, which respond to each other as much as they do to me.