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When studying constitutional law, students are likely to be exposed to the idea that interpretation of the United States Constitution may include reference to what are sometimes called "constitutional principles"--general and abstract normative ideas that can aid or guide attempts to glean meaning from the text and may even provide "extraconstitutional" or "nontextual" reasons for decisions in constitutional cases. For example, interpretation of the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment might be guided by an "antisubordination principle" or an "equal citizenship principle." Similarly, the federalism provisions of the constitution might be interpreted in light of a principle of "dual sovereignty" or a principle of "state sovereign immunity."
What are constitutional principles? How do they relate to legal theory more generally? Where do they come from? What role can they play in constitutional interpretation and the decision of particular cases? This entry in the Lexicon explores these questions and examines the role of principles in constitutional interpretation. As always, the Lexicon is aimed at law students, especially first-year law student, with an interest in legal theory.
The phrase "constitutional principle" is used in a variety of senses. For example, thre phrase "constitutional principle" could simply be another way of describe a constitutional "rule" or "standard." (This seems to be the sense in which principle is used in Wechsler's famous conception of "neutral principles" of constitutional law. See Weschler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 HARV. L. REV. 1 (1959). Or we might use the phrase to pick out matters of "principle" that are to be distinguished from matters of "prudence" or "pragmatisim." This Lexicon entry will focus on a more specialized or technical meaning of "principle." As I use the phrase, "constitutional principles" will be general and abstract normative propositions that are not themselves part of the constitutional text. Constitutional principles can be distinguished from rules and standards of constitutional law--principles provide normative guidance at a higher level of abstraction and generality than do "hard edged" constitutional rules or more "open textured" constitutional standards. This use of principle is related to Ronald Dworkin's use in his early essay Hard Cases and in his book on constitutional theory, A Matter of Principle.
For example, cases such as Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 117 S.Ct. 2365, 138 L.Ed.2d 914 (1997), and New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 112 S.Ct. 2408, 120 L.Ed.2d 120 (1992), affirm that a law is not " 'proper for carrying into Execution the Commerce Clause' " "[w]hen [it] violates [a constitutional] principle of state sovereignty."
The constitutional principle of state sovereignty is not in the text of the constitution. The text never uses the term "sovereign" or "sovereignty" and it never refers to the states as "sovereign". State sovereignty is not a rule of constitutional law. The principle doesn't provide any specific command, requirement, prohibition, or power. Instead, the principle of state sovereignty is best understand as shorthand for a normative conception of the powers and immunities of the states in the federal system.
This is a bit tricky. The notion of a constitutional principle is a bit "vague around the edges" and I haven't provided a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that sharply define what counts as a constitutional principle. Nonetheless, this is a familiar idea that is frequently invoked in constitutional theory and practice. For an example of sophisticated use of "constitutional principles," by a contemporary legal theorist, check out the links Jack Balkin's work on the method of "text and principle" at the end of this Lexicon entry.
Where to constitutional principles come from?
Principles derived from particular clauses. Some constitutional principles may be derived from particular clauses or provisions of the Constitution. For example, the "free speech" clause is vague, general, and abstract. What is the "freedom of speech"? What constitutes an "abridgement"? On approach to answering these questions is to posit a constitutional principle that states the central purpose or function that the clause serves. For example, the free speech clause might stand for a "principle of freedom of expression" or a "principle of equality of communicative opportunity."
Principles derived from constitutional structure. Another possibility is that constitutional principles might be derived from the structure of the constitution--either of the whole constitution or of some identifiable part. For example, there may be a constitutional principle of state sovereign immunity. There is not "sovereign immunity clause" of the constitution, but it might be argued that the Eleventh Amendment, Article III, the Tenth Amendment, and the importance of the States to the whole structure of federalism are the source of a general principle that favors the immunity of states from suits in federal court.
Principles Derived from Political or Constitutional Theory. Another possibility is that some constitutional principles might be derived from a source outside the text, for exampe, from background considerations of political morality or constitutional theory. For example, constitutions do not provide their own sources of normative legitimacy, but the conditions for constitutional legitimacy could be seen as the source of principles that would shape constitutional law. Suppose, for example, that we concluded that the constitution is legitimated by a theory of popular sovereignty--the constitution is legitimate because it was ratified by the people when originally adopted or because it is accepted by the people today. That theory of legitimacy might then provide a constitutional principle that would guide the interpretation of varoius provisions of the constitution.
What role do (or should) constitutional principles play in the interpretation of the constitution and in its application to particular cases, either inside or outside the courts? This is a complex issue, but we can simplify it by contrasting two uses of constitutional principle--which I shall call "direct" and "textualist."
Step One: Identify a constitutional principle (on the basis of (a) the text of a specific clause, (b) a structural feature of the constitution, or (c) some extraconstitutional consideration of political morality or constitutional theory.
Step Two: Apply the constitutional principle directly to a question of constitutional law, using the principle as the justification for a constitutional rule or doctrine that resolves a particular case.
Step One: Determine the relevant textual provisions of the constitution. If these provisions are neither ambiguous nor vague with respect to constitutional question at hand, then apply the text, but if there is relevant vagueness or ambiguity, then proceed to step two.
Step Two: Identify the constitutional principles that are relevant to the meaning of the vague or ambiguous constitutional provision.
Step Three: Resolve the ambiguity and/or adopt a construction of the vague provision on the basis of the relevant principle (or principles).
Step Four: Apply the disambiguated provision or the vagueness-resolving construction to the constitutional question at issue.
Most readers will immediately grasp the theoretical significance of the distinction between direct and textualist use of constitutional principles. Some theories of constitutitional interpretation insist that the text of the constitution plays an essential role in constitutional law. "Textualism" or "original meaning originalism," for example, insist that the linguistic meaning of the constitution is given by the "original public meaning" of the constitutional text. It might be thought that these theories are inconsistent with constitutional principless, but, as we have seen, this is not necessarily the case. If constitutional principles are used to resolve ambiguity or vagueness, then their use may be entirely consistent with an approach that gives pride of place to the original public meaning of the constitutional text.
On the other hand, there are alternative constitutional theories that seem more consistent with the direct use of constitutional principles. For example, some forms of original intentions originalism conceptualize the original intentions of the framers as general principles: these principles (or intentions) can then be applied directly to resolve particular cases. Similarly, Ronald Dworkin's approach to constitutional interpretation could be understood as consistent with the direct approach to constitutional principle.
There is much more to be said about the idea of constitutional principles. And of course, the use of principles in legal theory is not limited to constitutional theory. Principles can play a similar role in statutory interpretation and in common-law reasoning. Nonetheless, I hope this Lexicon entry has given you a basic introduction that will enable you to think about the role of principles in constitutional theory.
Jack M. Balkin, Abortion and Original Meaning.
Ronald Dworkin, "Hard Cases" in Taking Rights Seriously.
Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle.
Herbert Weschler, Toward Neutral Principles of Constitutional Law, 73 HARV. L. REV. 1 (1959).
The counter-majoritarian difficulty may be the best known problem in constitutional theory. The phrase is attributed to Alexander Bickel—a Yale Law School Professor—who is said to have introduced it in his famous book The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics . Whatever Bickel actually meant by the phrase, it has now taken on a life of its own. The counter-majoritarian difficulty states a problem with the legitimacy of the institution of judicial review: when unelected judges use the power of judicial review to nullify the actions of elected executives or legislators, they act contrary to “majority will” as expressed by representative institutions. If one believes that democratic majoritarianism is a very great political value, then this feature of judicial review is problematic. For at least two or three decades after Bickel’s naming of this problem, it dominated constitutional theory.
This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon explores the counter-majoritarian difficulty, efforts to solve the problem and to dissolve it. As always, the Lexicon is aimed at law students, especially first-year law students, with an interest in legal theory. As is frequently the case with the Lexicon, we will explore a very big topic in just a few paragraphs. Many articles and books have been written about the counter-majoritarian difficulty; we will only scratch its surface. Moreover, any really deep discussion of the counter-majoritarian difficulty would lead (sooner or later) to almost every other topic in constitutional theory. The Lexicon is “quick and dirty,” and definitely not deep, comprehensive, or authoritative.
There are many different theories of democratic legitimacy, and only some of them emphasize “majoritarianism” as the key factor.
Some theories of democratic legitimacy rely on the idea of “consent of the governed,” but it is very difficult to mount an argument for actual consent to existing majoritarian institutions or their actions.
The idea of “legitimacy” is itself deeply controversial and might even be called obscure. What legitimacy is and why it is important are themselves deep and controversial questions.
Despite these complexities, most of us have a rough and ready appreciation for the idea that actions by democratic majorities have some kind of legitimacy that is lacking in the actions of unelected judges. At any rate, that idea is the normative foundation of the counter-majoritarian difficulty.
The counter-majoritarian difficulty is sometimes characterized as a problem with the institution of judicial review, but it could also be understood as a difficulty for any constitution that constrains majority will. Of course, there could be constitutions that impose no limits at all on the will of democratically elected legislatures. For example, a regime of unicameral parliamentary supremacy might be said to have a constitution that allows a parliamentary majority to pass any legislation that it pleases and to override the courts or executive whenever the legislature is in disagreement with their actions. Of course, even this simple constitution might constrain the legislature in a certain sense. Legislation that attempts to constrain the action of a future legislature might be “unconstitutional.” Another example might be legislation that abolishes elections and substitutes a system of self-perpetuating appointments. Similarly, a legislature might pass a “bill of rights” that purports to bind future legislatures, even in the absence of an institution of judicial review.
Even though the counter-majoritarian difficulty might be a feature of any system with a binding constitution, the difficulty is especially acute for a regime that incorporates the institution of judicial review incorporating judicial supremacy. In the United States, for example, the courts have the power to declare that acts of Congress are unconstitutional, and if the Supreme Court so declares, the Congress does not have the power to override its decision.
The institution of judicial review is counter-majoritarian in part because federal judges are not elected and they serve life terms. Presidents are elected every four years; members of the House of Representatives every two years; and Senators serve staggered six year terms. Of course, judges and justices are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate and these features create some degree of democratic control of the judiciary. Nonetheless, on the surface, it certainly looks like judicial review is an antidemocratic institution. Unelected judges strike down legislation enacted by elected legislators: that is certainly antidemocratic and antimajoritarian in some sense.
The counter-majoritarian difficulty is compounded by the nature of judicial review as it has been practiced by the modern Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court limited itself to enforcing the separation of powers between the President and Congress or to the enforcement of the relatively determinate provisions of the constitution that establish the “rules of the game” for the political branches, then the counter-majoritarian difficulty might not amount to much. But the modern Supreme Court has been involved in the enforcement of constitutional provisions that general, abstract, and seemingly value laden—examples include the freedom of speech, the equal protection clause, and the due process clause of the constitution. The counter-majoritarian difficulty seems particularly acute when it comes to so-called “implied fundamental rights,” like the right to privacy at issue in cases like Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade.
Judicial review in the United States includes judicial supremacy--the Supreme Court has the final say on the issues it decides, but this is not the only way that judicial review could be structured. In Canada, for example, provisions is made for a legislative override of the decisions striking down legislation. Such provisions ameliorate the counter-majoritarian difficulty, even if the override is rarely exercised, because they provide democratic control. Of course, even in the United States a Supreme Court decision can be overridden by a constitutional amendment, but that requires a supermajority.
How have constitutional theorists attempted to answer the counter-majoritarian difficulty? The problem with answer that question is that there are so many answers that it is difficult to single out three or four for illustrative purposes. So remember, the “answers” that are discussed here are arbitrary selections from a much longer list.
One famous answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty focuses on the idea of “discrete and insular minorities.” The background to this answer is the premise that in the long run, most individuals win some and lose some in the process of democratic decision making. Shifting coalitions among various interest groups “spread the wealth” and the pain—no one wins all the time or loses all the time. Or rather, normally wins and losses are spread across the many different groups that constitute a given political society. However, there may be some groups that are excluded from the give and take of democratic politics. Some groups may be so unpopular (or the victims of such extreme prejudice) that they almost always are the losers in the democratic process. The famous “Footnote Four” of the United States Supreme Court’s decision in the Carolene Products case can serve as the germ of an answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty. Judicial review is arguably legitimate when it serves to protect the interests of “discrete and insular minorities” against oppressive actions by democratic majorities.
Another answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty admits that judicial review is antidemocratic but seeks to justify this feature by appeal to some value that trumps democratic legitimacy. This isn’t really just one answer to the difficulty—it is a whole lot of answers that share a common feature—the appeal to anti-democratic political values. For example, it might be argued that “liberty” is a higher value than “democracy” and hence that judicial review to protect liberty is justified. Or it might be argued that “equality” is a higher value, or “privacy,” or something else. Obviously, there is a lot more to be said about this kind of answer to the counter-majoritarian difficulty, but for the purposes of this Lexicon entry, this incredibly terse explanation will have to suffice.
Yet a third approach to the counter-majoritarian difficulty attempts to turn the problem upside down—arguing that judicial review is actually a democratic institution that checks the antidemocratic actions of elected officials. Whoa Nelly! How does that work? This third approach is strongly associated with the work of Bruce Ackerman—perhaps the most influential constitutional theorist since Alexander Bickel. Ackerman’s views deserve at least a whole Lexicon entry, but the gist of his theory can be stated briefly. Ackerman argues for a view that can be called “dualism,” because it distinguishes between two kinds of politics—“ordinary politics” (the kind practiced every day by legislators and bureaucrats) and “constitutional politics.” What is “constitutional politics”? And how is it different from “ordinary politics”? Ackerman’s answers to these questions begin with the idea that ordinary politics isn’t very democratic. Why not? We all know the answer to that question. Ordinary politics are dominated by self-interested politicians and manipulative special interest groups. The people (or “We the People” as Ackerman likes to say) don’t really get involved in ordinary politics, and therefore, ordinary politics are not really very democratic. Constitutional politics, by way of contrast, involve extraordinary issues that actually “get the attention” of the people. For example, the ratification of the Constitution of 1789 caught the attention of ordinary citizens, as did the Reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th) following the Civil War. When “We the People” become engaged in constitutional politics, we are giving commands to our agents—Congress and the President—and the Courts are merely enforcing our will when they engaged in judicial review—so long as they are faithful to our commands.
Ackerman’s theory emphasized the idea of distinct regimes that resulted from “constitutional moments”—periods of intense popular involvement in constitutional politics. Recently, Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson have advanced a similar theory—which emphasizes that idea of “high politics”—the great popular movements that seek to influence the decisions of the Supreme Court on issues like abortion or affirmative action. I can’t do justice to their theory here, but the idea is that the Supreme Court may be responding to democratic pressures when it makes the really big constitutional decisions.
So far, I’ve been discussing responses to the counter-majoritarian difficulty that operate within normative constitutional theory. There is another important line of attack, however. The counter-majoritarian difficulty rests on a positive (factual) assumption—that the Supreme Court does, in fact, act contrary to political majorities. Some political scientists have argued that this positive assumption is incorrect—that the Supreme Court rarely, if ever, acts contrary to the wishes of the dominant political faction. There could be many reasons for that—one of them being the Supreme Court’s awareness that if it were to buck Congress and the President, it is vulnerable to a variety of political reprisals. Congress might strip the Court of jurisdiction. Ultimately, the President might simply refuse to cooperate with Court’s decisions.
There is another side to this story. There may be reasons why elected politicians prefer for the Supreme Court to “take the heat” for some decisions that are controversial. When the Supreme Court acts, politicians may be able to say, “It wasn’t me. It was that darn Supreme Court.” And in fact, the Supreme Court’s involvement in some hot button issues may actually help political parties to mobilize their base: “Give us money, so that we can [confirm/defeat] the President’s nominee to the Supreme Court, who may cast the crucial vote on [abortion, affirmative action, school prayer, etc.].” In other words, what appears to be counter-majoritarian may actually have been welcomed by the political branches that, on the surface, appear to have been thwarted.
Once again, I’ve gone on for too long. I hope you will forgive me, and I hope that this Lexicon entry has given you food for thought about the counter-majoritarian difficulty. Below, I’ve included a list of references to articles that focus on the difficulty itself and also to some of the authors who have attempted to give answers to Bickel’s famous problem.
This is a very incomplete list, emphasizing the works that are focused on “the counter-majoritarian difficulty” in particular and omitting many important works of constitutional theory that deal with the counter-majoritarian difficulty as part of a larger enterprise.
Bruce Ackerman, We the People, Volume 1: Foundations (1998).
Jack M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, Understanding the Constitutional Revolution, 87 Va. L. Rev. 1045 (2001).
Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics 16-18 (2d ed. 1986).
Barry Friedman, The Counter-Majoritarian Problem and the Pathology of Constitutional Scholarship, 95 Nw. U. L. Rev. 933 (2001).
Barry Friedman, The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part One: The Road to Judicial Supremacy, 73 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 333, 334 (1998).
Barry Friedman, The History Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part II: Reconstruction's Political Court , 91 Geo. L.J. 1 (2002).
Barry Friedman, The History Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Three: The Lesson Of Lochner, 76 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1383 (2001).
Barry Friedman, The History Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Four: Law's Politics, 148 U. Pa. L. Rev. 971 (2000).
Barry Friedman, The Birth Of An Academic Obsession: The History Of The Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part Five, 112 Yale L.J. 153 (2002).
Mark Graber, The Nonmajoritarian Difficulty: Legislative Deference to the Judiciary, 7 Studies in American Political Development 35 (1993).
Corinna Lain, Upside-Down Judicial Review, 101 Georgetown L. J. 113 (2012).
Miguel Schor, The Strange Cases of Marbury and Lochner in the Constitutional Imagination, 87 Tex. L. Rev. 1463, 1477-1486 (2009).
Ilya Somin, Political Ignorance and the Countermajoritarian Difficulty: A New Perspective on the Central Obsession of Constitutional Theory, 89 Iowa L. Rev. 1287 (2004).
Nimer Sultany, The State of Progressive Constitutional Theory: The Paradox of Constitutional Democracy and the Project of Political Justification, 47 Harv. C.L.-C.R. L. Rev. 371 (2012).
Mark Tushnet, Policy Distortion and Democratic Debilitation: Comparative Illumination of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, 94 Mich. L. Rev. 245 (1995).
Legitimacy. It’s a word much bandied about by students of the law. “Bush v. Gore was an illegitimate decision.” “The Supreme Court’s implied fundamental rights jurisprudence lacks legitimacy.” “The invasion of Iraq does not have a legitimate basis in international law.” We’ve all heard words like these uttered countless times, but what do they mean? Can we give an account of “legitimacy” that makes that concept meaningful and distinctive? Is “legitimacy” one idea or is it several different notions, united by family resemblance rather than an underlying conceptual structure?
This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon theory will examine the concept of legitimacy from various angles. As always, the Lexicon is aimed at law students, especially first-year law students, with an interest in legal theory.
Let’s begin with the distinction between normative legitimacy and sociological legitimacy. On the one hand, we talk about legitimacy as a normative concept. When we use “legitimacy” in the normative sense, we are making assertions about some aspect of the rightness or wrongness of some action or institution. On the other hand, legitimacy is also a sociological concept. When we use legitimacy in the sociological sense, we are making assertions about legitimacy beliefs--about what attitudes people have. Although these two senses of legitimacy are related to one another, they are not the same. That’s because an institution could be perceived as legitimate on the basis of false empirical beliefs or incorrect value premises. The opposite can be true as well: a controversial court decision (Roe, Bush v. Gore, etc.) could have been perceived as illegitimate, even if it had been a legitimate decision.
Legitimacy is a tricky concept but one thing is fairly clear. The legitimacy of an outcome is distinct from its correctness. Or to put it differently, a legal norm can be illegitimate but just, on the one hand, or morally bad but legitimate, on the other hand. One way to articulate this idea is to distinguish between process values and outcome values. Legitimate is usually thought to attach to the process by which a legal norm is created, whereas justice attaches to the legal norm itself. Thus, a democratic process can produce a legitimate but unjust legal norm.
Concepts and Conceptions--The distinction between normative and sociological legitimacy is important, but, by itself, it doesn’t get us very far. What does “legitimacy” mean? How is “legitimacy” different from “justice” or “correctness”? Those are deep questions—deserving of a book-length answer. My general policy in the Lexicon series is to steer a neutral course—avoiding controversial assertions about debatable matters of legal theory. But when it comes to legitimacy, it is difficult to stick to this plan. The difficulty is not so much that legitimacy is the subject of a well-defined debate; rather, the problem is that the concept of legitimacy is usually ill-defined and undertheorized.
So here is the strategy we will use. Let’s borrow the concept/conception distinction for a starting point. Let’s hypothesize that there is a general concept of legitimacy but that this concept is contested—different theorists have different views about what legitimacy consists in. Some theorists think that legitimacy is conferred by democratic procedures; others may think that legitimacy is a function of legal authorization; yet others believe that legitimacy is related to justice. Let’s take a look at four different notions of legitimacy.
Legitimacy as Democratic Process--One very important and influential idea of legitimacy is connected with democratic procedures. Let’s begin with a simple example. Suppose you belong to a small-scale organization of some kind—maybe a law-school faculty. The executive of the organization can take various actions on her own authority, but there are some matters that must be decided by democratic procedures. For example, suppose the Dean of a law school decided that all first-year classes should be taught in small-groups with cooperative-learning techniques and without the traditional case method and Socratic questioning. This might be a marvelous innovation. (I’m not saying it would be.) But if the Dean made the decision without the input of the faculty (or a vote of the faculty), then it is quite likely that there would be vociferous opposition to the new organization of the curriculum on the grounds that the Dean’s decision lacked democratic legitimacy.
Let’s take a more familiar example. Federal judges are not directly elected. They are appointed for life terms. Although the President (who nominates federal judges) and the Senate (which confirms them) are both elected bodies, the judges who sit at any given time have an indirect and diffuse democratic pedigree. Moreover, their life terms make them relatively insular. So there is a question of legitimacy about the institution of judicial review. Does the fact that Supreme Court Justices are not elected make it illegitimate for them to invalidate actions taken by elected officials? Of course, that’s a big question. For our purposes, the important point is that the question itself is one about democratic legitimacy.
Legitimacy as Legal Authority--Another conception of legitimate seems to focus on legal authority. For example, when President Truman ordered the seizure of the steel mills during the Korean War, there was not question but that he had been elected in 1948. But despite the fact that Truman was elected democratically, there was still a question about the legitimacy of his action. Even if his action was democratic, it may not have been legal. When an official acts outside her sphere of legal authority, we sometimes say that here decision was “illegitimate.” When we use “legitimacy” in this way, we seem to be relying on the idea that legitimacy is connected to legal authority. Actions that are not legally authorized are frequently called “illegitimate” whereas actions that are lawful are sometimes seen as legitimate for that reason.
Legitimacy as Reliability--Yet another theory ties legitimacy to the reliability of the process that produces the decision. To see the point of the “reliability conception” of legitimacy, we need to step back for a moment. There is a difference between the “correctness” or “justice” of a decision, on the one hand, and its “legitimacy” on the other. Indeed, this seems to be a crucial feature of “legitimacy.” We think that an incorrect decision can nonetheless be legitimate, whereas a correct decision can lack legitimacy.
Reliability theories acknowledge this “gap” between legitimacy and justice, but insist that there is nonetheless a strong connection between the two. The idea is that legitimacy requires a decision making process that meets some threshold requirement of reliability. So tossing a coin would not be a legitimate method for deciding legal disputes. Even if the coin toss came out the right way and the party that would have won in a fair trial did win the coin toss, the decision that resulted from the flip of a coin would be criticized as illegitimate.
One important example of a reliability theory of legitimacy is found in Randy Barnett’s book, Restoring the Lost Constitution. Barnett argues that the legitimacy of a constitution depends on its reliability in producing just outcomes. A legitimate constitution guarantees a tolerable level of justice. A constitution that does not provide such a guarantee is illegitimate—or so Barnett argues.
The distinctive feature of the principle is that it makes reasons count. That is, the principle bases legitimacy on reasonable endorsement “in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to . . . common human reason.” Readers of past lexicon entries will note that Rawls’s is referring her to his idea of public reason.
The principle does not require that citizens actually endorse the constitutional essentials. Rather, the requirement is that citizens “may reasonably be expected to endorse” the constitutional essentials. In other words, the constitutional essentials must be justified by public reasons in such a way that the justification is one that reasonable citizens could be expected to accept.
Citizens are asked to endorse the constitutional essentials “as free and equal”. That is, the principle assumes a certain political conception of citizens as free and equal members of society. The reasons are addressed to citizens conceived in this way, and not to citizens as they are, if that includes their rejection of the notion that each and every citizen should be regarded as a free and equal member of society.
Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy point us in the direction of a whole family of ideas about legitimacy. Rawls’s principle is tied to his idea of public reason, but we can imagine other theories of legitimacy that include particular kinds of reasons as legitimating or exclude categories of reasons as illegitimate.
We began our investigation of various conceptions of legitimacy with the working hypothesis that these would be “competing conceptions,” i.e., that only one of these theories of legitimacy could be correct for a given domain of application. Now, let’s take a second look at that assumption.
Is it really the case that the various conceptions of legitimacy compete with one another? There is another possibility—that some (or all) of these conceptions are complementary. For example, we might say that a given judicial decision has legitimacy in the sense that it was made by legally authorized officials, but that the same decision lacks democratic legitimacy, because it was made by unelected judges contrary to the will of democratically elected legislators. If this way of talking is sensible, then it may be the case that the various conceptions of legitimacy do not compete with one another, but rather exist in some sort of complementary relationship.
We’ve barely scratched the surface, but I hope this entry has given you food for thought about the idea of “legitimacy.” My own sense is that one should be very wary about deploying the idea of legitimacy. Because legitimacy has different senses and is undertheorized, it is very easy to make claims about legitimacy that are ambiguous or theoretically unsound.
Fabienne Peter, Political Legitimacy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2010).
The Psychology of Legitimacy: Emerging Perspectives on Ideology, Justice, and Intergroup Relations (John T. Jost & Brenda Major eds. Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Frederick M. Barnard, Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power (McGill-Queen's University Press 2001).
Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy (Jeffrey Seitzer trans., Durham (North Carolina): Duke University Press, 2004).
Steven Wheatley, The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law (Studies in International Law) (Hart Publishing 2010).
This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon is a bit unusual. Rather than explicating concepts that are important to legal theory, the point of this post is to debunk two concepts that sometimes seem to have very little content as used in popular discourse.
A case can be made for a revised and conceptually more coherent version of each of these concepts. Whether constitutional theorists will be able to agree on consistent and clear definitions remains to be seen.
Strict construction is short hand for the idea that the United States Constitution should be strictly construed. The phrase appears to have become popular as a campaign slogan used by Richard Nixon when he ran for President in 1968. Nixon promised that he would appoint judges who were "strict constructionists" as opposed to the "judicial activism" that characterized the Warren Court, but the phrase has much earlier origins and may go back as far as the late eighteenth century.
strict construction (narrow construction) n. interpreting the Constitution based on a literal and narrow definition of the language without reference to the differences in conditions when the Constitution was written and modern conditions, inventions and societal changes. By contrast "broad construction" looks to what someone thinks was the "intent" of the framers' language and expands and interprets the language extensively to meet current standards of human conduct and complexity of society.
This definition borders on incoherence, opposing "strict construction" to both originalism and to the notion of a living constitution--ideas that might be thought antithetical to one another. So can we offer a better definition of strict construction? One way to approach this question is via the method of separation of cases. What are the possible meanings of strict construction?
Strict Construction as "Textualism in the Broad Sense". One possibility is that strict construction refers to textualism--the idea that all constitutional interpretations must be grounded in the text of the Constitution. There are two difficulties with this suggestion. First, almost all of the Warren Court jurisprudence to which strict constructionism was opposed was rooted in the text of the Constitution in some way. Even the "unenumerated rights" jurisprudence (e.g. the right to privacy at issue in Griswold v. Connecticut and Roe v. Wade) was grounded in the text of the 14th amendment. Second, this definition provides no content to the idea that constructions must be "strict."
Strict Construction as "Literalism". Another possibility is that strict construction involves literal rather than purposive interpretations of the constitutional text. Perhaps, a strict construction is one that reads each clause of the Constitution to mean what the plain language says and nothing more. This idea is more promising than textualism, because it gives some real bite to the idea of "strictness" in construction. The difficulty is that the proponents of "strict construction" (and others) have rarely advocated a thorough-going literalism. That approach would, for example, mean that the First Amendment to the Constitution applies only to Congress (and not to the states, the executive, or to common-law doctrines). Other provisions of the Constitution don't seem to have any determinate literal meaning--the due process clause, the privileges and immunities clause, and the republican form of government clause come to mind.
Strict Construction as "Originalism". Yet another possibility is that strict construction refers to some form of originalism, either original-intention originalism or original-meaning originalism. (The former looks to the intentions of the framers, whereas the latter looks to the way the text would have been understood by citizens when it was adopted.) Original-intentions originalism does not fit well with the label "strict constructionism" as it would allow courts to take into account intentions of the framers that are not "strictly speaking" in the constitutional text. The latter is a much better fit with the idea of strict construction, but the label "strict construction" is simply not very descriptive of the idea that the constitutional text should be read today in a way that fits the way it would have been read at the time it was adopted.
Strict Construction as a "Presumption of Constitutionality". Yet another possibility is that the constitution should be construed against challenges to the constitutionality of legislation or executive action. The idea of a presumption in favor of the constitutionality of challenged action is certainly a coherent idea, but it is not clear why such a presumption should be called "strict construction." One might naturally assume that a strict construction of the constitution would invalidate government action that contravened the meaning of the constitutional text.
Strict construction as narrow interpretation of delegated powers. One final possibility is that a strict construction of the Constitution is one that narrowly construes Congress's delegated powers.
We could go on, but I think you will now see the point. It simply isn't clear what "strict construction" means. Once you actually give content to the idea of strict construction, then the label isn't particularly descriptive and better names can be given to the view that "strict construction" could name. For this reason, most serious constitutional theorists avoid using the phrase "strict construction." If you think you have a good reason to continue using this phrase, you might give serious consideration to offering a very careful definition when you first introduce the term.
I want to add an important qualification to this discussion. It is entirely possible that "strict construction" once had a coherent meaning that has been "lost" with the passage of time. If so, then "strict construction" may yet have an important role to play as a concept in constitutional history, and possibly, via that history, in contemporary theories of constitutional interpretation.
Since the Warren Court era, conservative political discourse in the United States has applauded "strict construction" and condemned "judicial activism" is bad. Similarly, liberals defended Warren Court "activism." Recently, the political valence of "judicial activism" may have begun to shift--as conservatives endorse some "activism" by a conservative Supreme Court and liberals criticize these same decisions.
Judicial Activism as Nonabstention. One idea would be that activist judges decide cases, whereas passive judges abstain. This would make sense of "judicial activism," but it is completely unattractive as a normative ideal. Judges need to decide cases; they need to be active in the sense that they resolve controversies.
Judicial Activism as Exercise of the Power of Judicial Review. A second possibility is that judicial activism means striking down statutes or invalidating executive action. A passive judge approves the conduct of the other branches of government; an active judge strikes such conduct down. Once again, this interpretation is coherent, but hardly anyone thinks that it is per se wrong for judges to invalidate unconstitutional governmental action. Very few critics of "judicial activism" would criticize a court that struck down a federal statute requiring every American to attend the services of a particular denomination. Nor would many critics of judicial activism endorse a judicial decision that upheld a law reestablishing slavery. If "activism" means "exercising the power of judicial review to invalidate executive or legislative action," then it is a coherent concept, but it would seem to be "neutral" as between good and bad judging.
Judicial Activism as Incorrect Exercise of the Power of Judicial Review. What is usually meant by judicial activism is not simply judicial activity or judicial activity invalidating action by the political branches. Rather, judicial activism means judicial activity that wrongfully invalidates action by the political branches. This naturally leads to the question, "What makes an exercise of the power of judicial review wrongful?" The answer to that question is a theory of constitutional interpretation. Different theories authorize different sets of invalidations. So, adherents of different constitutional theories would apply the label "judicial activism" to different sets of decisions.
And that's the problem with the phrase "judicial activism." One can define judicial activism in a way that doesn't boil down to "wrong," but those definitions make the phrase useless as a term of criticism. Or one can define judicial activism in such a way that it has real critical bite, but then the phrase ends up as a synonym for incorrect. Either way, "judicial activism" is not a useful term for constitutional theorists.
Strict Construction as Judicial Constraint by the Text and Judicial Restraint If Language is Unclear. We might define strict construction as the conjunction of two distinct ideas. The first element would be constraint by text. Thus, a construction would not be strict if it was inconsistent with the linguistic meaning of the text of a statute, constitution, or other legal text. The second element would be constraint in cases where the text was not clear, e.g., where the text was vague, open-textured, or otherwise lacked a clear and discernible meaning.
Judicial Activism as Judicial Invalidation of Action by Legislative or Executive Officials. This definition has the consequence that "judicial activisim" would, for many constitutional theorists, be a value neutral term. Many constitutional theories favor judicial activism in the stipulated sense: for example, originalists favor judicial activism when the orignal meaning of the constitutional text requires invalidation of a statute enacted by Congress.
This post has had two goals. The first is to convince you that "strict construction" and "judicial activism" are simply not very useful as theory terms for academic constitutional lawyers. The second is to illustrate the importance of clear explication of constitutional concepts. Constitutional theory is a value-laden activity. Debates about positions in constitutional theory are frequently extensions of debates in moral and political theory generally. The vocabulary of constitutional theory is itself contested. Phrases like "strict construction" and "judicial activism" are normatively fraught, but they may not be well defined.
For that reason, it is very important for constitutional theorists to be very careful about their use of language. If you use these phrases, then be sure to define them!
One of the most important topics in legal theory is “legal interpretation,” the theory of the derivation of meaning from legal texts. Of course, legal interpretation is a very large topic, with several different dimensions and approaches. This post will focus on “textualism,” and provide some introductory ideas about interpretive theory in general. As always, the Legal Theory Lexicon is designed for law students—especially first year law students—with an interest in legal theory.
Level Two: Communicative Theories of Interpretation--A second kind of theory aims at the recovery of the linguistic meaning (or "communicative content") of a text.
Level Three: Normative Theories of Interpretation—A third kind of theory addresses the normative question, “What should legal interpretations (or constructions) aim at?” Among the answers to this question are: (a) the morally best reading of the legal text; (b) the intentions of the authors of the legal text, and (c) the plain meaning of the legal text.
Level Four: Methodological Theories of Interpretation—A fourth kind of theory aims to provide practical advice to legal actors (judges, lawyers, administrative officials, and citizens) about the techniques they can use to interpret various types of legal texts.
Textualism, the subject of this post, can operate at the second, third, or fourth levels. That is, textualism could be the view that what legal texts really mean (as a "fact of the matter") is their plain meaning. Or textualism could be the view that legal interpreters ought to adopt constructions of legal texts that correspond to their plain meaning, even if that does not correspond to the linguistic meaning or communicative content of the text.. Or textualism could simply be a practical technique—a method that judges should employ. In this post, the primary focus will be on levels two and three—textualism as a semantic or normative theory—with some discussion of level four (textualism as practical methodology).
Let’s begin with a basic question: what do we mean when we say “the plain meaning of the text.” A really good answer to that question would require us to develop a theory of meaning in general, but we must avoid that enterprise--at least for the purposes of this post. At one level, the idea of plain meaning is pretty simple. The plain meaning of a legal text is the meaning that would be understood by regular folks who were competent speakers of the language and who knew that they were reading a statute (or court decision, etc.).
But this preliminary formulation is too simple. Some laws are meant for all citizens (e.g., criminal statutes) and some are meant only for specialists (e.g., some sections of the tax code). A text that means one thing in a legal context, might mean something else if it were in a technical manual or a novel. So the plain meaning of a legal text is something like the meaning that would be understood by competent speakers of the natural language in which the text was written who are within the intended readership of the text and who understand that the text is a legal text of a certain type.
Literal Meaning. The literal meaning of a text is provided by its semantic content alone, with no consideration of context. Literal meaning is sparser than plain meaning, because the conventional semantic meaning of many words and phrases is very sparse, with contextual disambiguation or precisification enriching the plain meaning.
Purposive Meaning. Sometimes we use the word "meaning" to represent the purpose for which a text was written. Purposive interpretation is a rival of textualism.
Reasonable Meaning: The plain meaning of a text may not be the best meaning (from the perspective of some policy goal or normative theory). The plain meaning of a text may not be the "reasonable"or "desirable" meaning.
So when I blog, I know that the readers of blogs assign a particular meaning to the word “post,” and I also know that my readers know that I know that they know this blogospheric convention. So I can use the term “post” to refer to blog entries with confidence that my readers will understand what I mean. On the other hand, if I were writing about blogging for an audience that had never encountered a blog, I would probably need to define the term “post,” before I used it, and if I used the term “post” without defining it, then my audience might believe I was referring to mail and not blog entries.
In other words, when someone speaks or writes for a particular audience on a particular occasion, the speaker or author can take into account what she knows about the audience, what the audience knows about her, but only insofar as the speaker knows that the audience knows what the speaker knows about the audience.
Speaker’s meaning can be distinguished from sentence meaning. Sentence meaning is the meaning that an utterance has when the audience is unaware of the speaker’s intentions. When we identify sentence meaning, it is as if we were imaging a sot of generic speaker, who uttered the sentence in a generic context. Or putting this a bit differently, sentence meaning is the meaning we would assign sentences when we know that the speaker or author can’t assume that we are aware of special conventions about meaning.
Legal texts are sometimes intended for a timeless, generic readership. The authors of legislation, for example, know that many different actors (judges, lawyers, administrative officials, and ordinary citizens) will read the statute for an extended period of time in a variety of different conditions. Many of these readers will not be able to afford access to analysis of the legislative history of the statute; they will simply read the statute itself. Of course, they will know that the text they are reading is a statute, and they will therefore have a fair amount of knowledge about the likely intended meaning of various terms and phrases. Moreover, the legislature knows that the readers of statutes will have this knowledge. So it might make sense to assume that the speaker’s meaning that should be assigned to a legal text is a special version of the sentence meaning of the text, e.g. legal sentence meaning.
If we view textualism as a semantic theory of interpretation, the question we need to ask is whether the plain meaning is the linguistic meaning of the text. There is no general answer to this question--it all depends on the nature of the text. Texts that are directed to a particular audience on a particular occasion may have speaker's meaning. But in general legal contexts that are directed to the public at large will have sentence meaning--that is, their meaning will be a function of the conventional semantic meaning of the text and not the intentions of a particular speaker.
But if we view textualism as a normative theory of interpretation, we need to ask to ask why interpreters of legal texts should aim for interpretations that yield that “plain meaning of the text.” The usual answer to this question is that plain meaning best serves the rule of law values of publicity, predictability, certainty, and stability of the law. One of the important rule of law values is publicity: the law should be accessible to ordinary citizens. Ordinary citizens are likely to interpret statutes to have their plain meaning, because ordinary folks rarely have the training to understand legislative history and even if they did have such training, it would simply be too costly to analyze the legislative history of statutes to determine their meaning.
Lawyers who counsel citizens and organizations do have the training to analyze legislative history, but can more easily and cheaply discern the plain meaning of a statute than some special meaning that only becomes clear once the legislative history is consulted. Moreover, analysis of legislative history can be quite complex, because some sources of legislative history (e.g. the statements of floor managers) are thought by some to be more reliable than others (e.g. the statements of opponents of a bill or of the author of a bill). Because of the complexity of statutory interpretation, lawyers are likely to disagree about the meaning of legislative history and to err when predicting how a court will interpret legislative history.
Even if textualism does not provide the best semantic or normative theory of legal interpretation, it might be the case that textualism does provide the best practical method of interpretation given the capacities of real world judges and officials. Suppose that we want to interpret statutes to achieve the purposes of the legislature. At first blush, it might seem that the best way to do this would be to have courts and officials employ an intentionalist methodology, combing the legislative record for evidence of legislative intent. But as a practical matter, it may turn out that judges aren’t very good at doing this. So it might be the case that real-world judges are more likely to implement legislative purposes by employing a fairly simple plain-meaning approach as methodology for statutory interpretation. And to the extent that legislators know that judges will employ this approach, legislators could draft with the expectation that judges will use a plain-meaning methodology, which presumably would lead to even closer fit between the plain meaning and the achievement of legislative purpose.
“Textualism” is just one of many approaches to the theory of legal interpretation, but it is an especially good place to begin thinking about issues of interpretation in law. One of the very best ways to become a sophisticated thinker about these issues is to take a really good course in statutory interpretation. Not so long ago, statutory interpretation was considered a dead field, but today there is a tremendous flowering of interesting and exciting scholarship about the interpretation of statutes. I hope that this post has whetted your appetite!
There are many different theories of constitutional interpretation, but the most controversial and also perhaps the most influential is "originalism"--actually a family of constitutional theories. The idea that courts would look to evidence from the constitutional convention, the ratification debates, The Federalist Papers, and the historical practice shortly after ratification of the Constitution of 1789 (or to equivalent sources for amendments) is an old one. This post provides a very brief introduction to "originalism" that is aimed at law students (especially first-year law students) with an interest in legal theory.
Originalism is not just an ivory tower theory. It has had a profound influence on the practice of constitutional interpretation and the political contest over the shape of the federal judiciary. President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork (an avowed originalist) was one key moment--with his defeat by the Democrats was seen as a political rejection of originalism. The current Supreme Court has at least two members who seem strongly influenced by originalist constitutional theory--Associate Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas and two others, John Roberts and Samuel Alito who may also be receptive to originalist arguments.
No one scholar or judge deserves credit for originalism as a movement in constitutional theory and practice, but in my opinion one of the crucial events in the originalist revival was the publication of Raoul Berger's book, Government by Judiciary in 1977 by Harvard University Press. As you can guess from the title, Berger's book was very critical of the Warren Court (and its aftermath in the 70s). One of the key responses to Berger was the publication of The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding by Paul Brest in 1980. Brest's article initiated an intense theoretical debate over the merits of originalism that continues today. The landscape changed again in the late 1980s, when Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that originalists should shift their attention from "the original intentions of the framers" to the "public meaning of the constitutional text" or "original meaning."
The final chapter of the originalism debate in legal theory has yet to be written--and perhaps it never will be. But one last set of developments is particularly important. In the 70s and early 80s, originalism was strongly associated with conservative judicial politics and conservative legal scholars. But in the late 1980s and in the 1990s, this began to change. One of the important moves was the shift from "original intentions" to "original public meaning," but two other developments were key. First, Bruce Ackerman's work on constitutional history suggested the availability of "left originalism" that maintained the commitment to the constitutional will of "We the People" but argued that the constitution included a New Deal constitutional moment that legitimated the legacy of the Warren Court. (Ackerman does not call himself an "originalist," but many of Ackerman's former students do work that is implicitly or explicitly originalist.) Second, Randy Barnett (the leading figure in libertarian legal theory) embraced originalism in an influential article entitled An Originalism for Nonoriginalists. The most recent development in this dynamic is Jack Balkin's attempt to reconcile originalism with living constitutionalism. Balkin's article, "Abortion and Original Meaning" (link provided below) elicited a good deal of commentary and criticism: his recent book, Living Originalism, further develops his take on originalist theory and applies it to a variety of topics.
After the publication of Paul Brest's Misconceived Quest one heard talk that originalism was dead as a serious intellectual movement. These days one is just as likely to hear pronouncements of a different sort: "we are all originalists" or "originalism and living constitutionalism are compatible" or even "originalism is trivially true. Contemporary debates about originalism sometimes use the label, "the New Originalism" to distinguish the current emphasis on "original public meaning" from older forms of originalism that emphasized "original intentions." The story of that transition is crucial to understanding the current discussion among constitutional theorists.
Early originalists emphasized something called the original intentions of the framers. Even in the early days, there were disputes about what this phrase meant. Of course, there were debates about whether the framers (a collective body) had any intentions at all. And there were questions about what counted as "intentions," e.g. expectations, plans, hopes, fears, and so forth. But the most important early debate concerned levels of generality. The intentions of the framers of a given constitutional provision can be formulated as abstract and general principles or as particular expectations with respect to various anticipated applications of the provision. Most theorists will assent to this point, which flows naturally from the ordinary usage and conceptual grammar of the concept of intention. The difficulty comes because the different formulations of intention can lead to different results in any given particular case. For example, the intention behind the equal protection clause might be formulated at a relatively high level of generality--leading to the conclusion that segregation is unconstitutional--or at a very particular level--in which case the fact that the Reconstruction Congress segregated the District of Columbia schools might be thought to support the "separate but equal" principle of Plessy v. Ferguson. Perhaps the most rigorous defender of the original intentions version of originalism has been Richard Kay in a series of very careful articles.
Yet another challenge to original-intent originalism was posed by Jefferson Powell's famous article, The Original Understanding of Original Intent, published in 1985. Powell argued that the framers themselves did not embrace an original intention theory of constitutional interpretation. Of course, this does not settle the theoretical question. The framers, after all, could have been wrong on this point. But Powell's critique was very powerful for those who insisted that constitutional interpretation must always return to origins. A certain kind of original-intent theory was self-defeating, if Powell's historical analysis was correct. Moreover, some of the reasons that Powell identified for the framers' resistance to originalism were quite powerful. Especially important was the idea that "secret intentions" or "hidden agendas" had no legitimate role to play in constitutional meaning. In the end, however, Powell's article actually had the effect of turning originalism in a new direction--from original intention to original meaning.
The original-meaning version of originalism emphasizes the meaning that the Constitution (or its amendments) would have had to the relevant audience at the time of its adoptions. How would the Constitution of 1789 have been understood by an ordinary adult citizen at the time it was adopted? Of course, the same sources that are relevant to original intent are relevant to original meaning. So, for example, the debates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia may shed light on the question how the Constitution produced by the Convention would have been understood by those who did not participate in the secret deliberations of the drafters. But for original-meaning originalists, other sources become of paramount importance. The ratification debates and Federalist Papers can be supplemented by evidence of ordinary usage and by the constructions placed on the Constitution by the political branches and the states in the early years after its adoption. The turn to original meaning made originalism a stronger theory and vitiated many of the powerful objections that had been made against original-intentions originalism.
This sets the stage for what is sometimes called “the New Originalism” and also is called “Original Meaning Originalism.” Whatever the actual origins of this theory, the conventional story identifies Antonin Scalia as having a key role. As early as 1986, Scalia gave a speech exhorting originalists to “change the label from the Doctrine of Original Intent to the Doctrine of Original Meaning.” The phrase “original public meaning” seems to have entered into the contemporary theoretical debates in the work of Gary Lawson with Steven Calabresi as another “early adopter.” The core idea of the revised theory is that the original meaning of the constitution is the original public meaning of the constitutional text.
Randy Barnett and Keith Whittington have played prominent roles in the development of the “New Originalism.” Both Barnett and Whittington build their theories on a foundation of “original public meaning,” but they extend the moves made by Scalia and Lawson in a variety of interesting ways. For the purposes of this very brief survey, perhaps their most important move is to embrace the distinction between “constitutional interpretation” understood as the enterprise of discerning the semantic content of the constitution and “constitutional construction,” which we might tentatively define as the activity of further specifying constitutional rules when the original public meaning of the text is vague (or underdeterminate for some other reason). This distinction explicitly acknowledges what we might call “the fact of constitutional underdeterminacy.” With this turn, original-meaning originalist explicitly embrace the idea that the original public meaning of the text “runs out” and hence that constitutional interpretation must be supplemented by constitutional construction, the results of which must be guided by something other than the semantic content of the constitutional text.
Once originalists had acknowledged that vague constitutional provisions required construction, the door was opened for a reconciliation between originalism and living constitutionalism. The key figure in that reconciliation has been Jack Balkin, whose influential 2006 and 2007 essays Abortion and Original Meaningand Original Meaning and Constitutional Redemptionhave argued for a reconciliation of original meaning originalism with living constitutionalism in the form of a theory that might be called “the method of text and principle.” Balkin has called his position on the relationship between originalism and living constitutionalism "comptibilism," but it is important to understand that this means that an originalist approach to interpretation is consistent with a living constitutionalist approach to construction.
Yet another important twist in originalist theory is emphasized by the work of Bruce Ackerman: a twist that I shall call "regime theory." The foundation for regime theory is the simple observation that the Constitution of the United States was adopted in several pieces--the Constitution of 1789 was supplemented by a variety of amendments. And of these amendments, the three reconstruction amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th) are of especial importance--because of the significant structural transformation they work in the relationship between the powers of the national government and the powers of the states. Interpreting the whole Constitution requires an understanding of the relationship between the provisions of 1789 and those adopted during Reconstruction. Some regime theorists argue that the interaction between these two constitutional regimes has the implication that provisions adopted in 1789 take on a new meaning and significance after the Reconstruction Amendments were adopted.
Ackerman's own version of regime theory includes a fascinating and important challenge for originalists of all stripes. Ackerman emphasized the fact that both the Constitution of 1789 and the Reconstruction Amendments were adopted through processes that were extralegal under the legal standards the prevailed at the time. The Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent of all the states for constitutional amendments and for complicated reasons, it seems likely that the Reconstruction Amendments were of dubious legality if strictly judged by the requirements set forth for amendments in Article V. Ackerman's conclusion was that the Constitution derives its legitimacy, not from the legal formalities, but from "We the People," when mobilized in extraordinary periods of constitutional politics. Perhaps the most controversial conclusion that Ackerman reaches is that the New Deal involved another such constitutional moment, in which "We the People" authorized President Roosevelt to act as an extraordinary Tribune, empowered to alter the constitutional framework through a series of transformative appointments. If one accepts this view, then one might begin to ask questions about the "original meaning" of the New Deal--a kind of originalism that would surely not be embraced by the conservative proponents of originalism in the 70s and early 80s.
Does Originalism Have a Core?
Originalism continues to evolve, and the lines of development sometimes converge, but it is fair to observe that originalism in the early years of the twenty-first century has several variations. "Original public meaning" is one focal point, and the distinction between "interpretation" and "construction" has gained widespread traction, but there are many points upon which originalists disagree. This leads to the question: does originalism have a core? One answer to this question focuses on the distinction between two dimensions of the debate about originalism. The first dimension is linguistic: the linguistic dimension of controversies about constitutional interpretation addresses the question, "What is the meaning of the constitutional text?" The second dimensions is normative: the normative dimension of debates about constitutional practice addresses the question: "How should constitutional actors (judges, other officials, and citizens) act once the meaning of the constitution has been determined?" Almost all originalists agree that the linguistic meaning of the constitutional text was fixed at the time each provision was framed and ratified: this idea can be called the fixation thesis. Originalists have different views about the effect that the constitutional text should have, but almost all originalists would agree that at a minimum the original meaning should constraint constitutional practice: this idea can be called the constraint principle.
The point made in the prior paragraph can easily be misunderstood. New originalists who embrace the distinction between construction and interpretation concede that the meaning of some constitutional provisions is vague, and therefore that these provisions require construction that goes beyond translation of the meaning of the text into legal doctrine. The core commitment of originalism to fixed linguistic meaning does not necessarily entail fixed constructions. For example, it might be the case that the key phrases that define the constitutional separation of powers, "judicial power," "executive power," and "legislative power," have an original public meaning that was vague. Given this vagueness, much of the important work required to resolve a dispute about the application of these phrases must be done by constitutional construction. This means that originalists who share the core commitment to the idea that meaning was fixed by 1789 when the Constitution was ratified may disagree about the proper method of construction of the separation of powers provisions.
Originalists disagree about other important questions as well. In particular, there is no consensus among originalists about the normative justifications for fidelity to the original meaning. Some originalists belive that originalism is normatively justified by popular sovereignty theory: we should adhere to the original meaning because it was ratified by "We the People." Other originalists, like Randy Barnett, argue that the legitimacy of the Constitution is a function of the justice of its content. And yet other originalists have argued that adherence to original meaning is justified by the rule of law values of predictability, certainty, and stability. These disagreements about normative foundations may lead to further disagreements about the extent to which "original meaning" should trump other considerations. For example, should constitutional actors always adhere to original meaning when it conflicts with historical practice or judicial precedent?
We are already beginning to see originalists coming to grips with the relationship between original meaning and precedent--both in the narrow sense of Supreme Court decisions and the broader sense of the settled practices of the political branches of government and the states. Some originalists have argued that as a general rule, constitutional actors should follow original meaning, even if it would conflict with longstanding historical practice or settled precedent. Other originalists argue that precedent and/or historical practice can trump original meaning in specified circumstances. Among originalist judges, Justice Scalia has sometimes argued that precedent trumps original meaning, whereas Justice Thomas seems to be more willing to upset precedent that is inconsistent with originalism.
The most recent installment in debates over the new originalism has been the emergence of a recent body of work that criticizes the new originalism. This work includes "Rebooting Originalism" by Stephen Griffin, "Originalism is Bunk" by Mitch Berman, and "Originalism's Living Constitutionalism," by Thomas Colby and Peter Smith. The distinctive feature of the new criticism is that it takes into account, in various ways, originalisms shift from intentions to public meanings.
This entry in the Legal Theory Lexicon is both too long and too short. Too long, because I strive to make Lexicon entries sufficiently brief so that they can be read in just a few minutes. Too short, because the convulated terrain of the originalism debates can only be fully mapped (much less argued out) in a very long article. Nonetheless, I hope that I have provided enough background for a beginning student of constitutional law to get a sense of the lay of the land. Debates about the new originalism are at the center of contemporary constitutional theory, but the long and twisted history of those debates makes it difficult to get started without a guide.
This very selective bibliography includes some of the articles that have been influential in the ongoing debates over originalism.
Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations (Harvard University Press 1991) & We the People: Transformations (Harvard University Press 1998).
Randy Barnett, An Originalism for Nonoriginalists, 45 Loyola Law Review 611 (1999) & Restoring the Lost Constitution (Princeton University Press 2004).
Raoul Berger, Government by Judicary (Harvard University Press 1977).
Robert Bork, The Tempting of America (Vintage 1991).
Paul Brest, The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding, 60 Boston University Law Review 204 (1980).
Robert N. Clinton, Original Understanding, Legal Realism, and the Interpretation of the Constitution, 72 Iowa L. Rev. 1177 (1987).
Richard Kay, Adherence to the Original Intentions in Constitutional Adjudication: Three Objections and Responses, 82 Northwestern Univeristy Law Review 226 (1988).
Gary Lawson, Proving the Law, 86 NW. U. L. REV. 859, 875 (1992).
Jefferson Powell, The Original Understanding of Original Intent, 98 Harv. L. Rev. 885 (1985).
Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (Kansas 1999) & Constitutional Construction: Divided Power and Constitutional Meaning (Harvard University Press 2001).
Originalism: A Quarter Century of Debate (Stephen G. Calabresi ed., Regnery Press 2007).
Lawrence Solum, District of Columbia v. Heller and Originalism.

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