We're All Originalists Now

On Friday, October 4, Northwestern Law School hosted a conference, “Originalism and History: An Interdisciplinary Discussion,” organized by Northwestern law professors John O. McGinnis (well known to Law & Liberty readers) and Jim Pfander. The readings and discussion at the conference highlighted the differences between historians and legal scholars. One line of debate involved the historians criticizing legal originalists for lowballing the difficulty of discerning the historical meaning of legal texts—and specifically, the U.S. Constitution—from the distance of over 200 years. For their part, the originalist legal scholars complained that historians set the threshold for historical knowledge required to understand constitutional texts artificially high. To encourage open discussion, the conference's ground rules sensibly forbade quotation with attribution, so in what follows I only sketch a couple of general reflections in response to the day's wide-ranging discussion.