Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2016
Abstract
In Is Originalism Our Law?, William Baude has made a good kind of argument in favor of originalism. Rather than contending that originalism is the only coherent theory for interpreting a constitution, he makes the more modest claim that it happens to be the way that American judges interpret our Constitution. If he is right—if originalism is our law—then judges deciding constitutional cases ought to be originalists. But what exactly would the content of that obligation be? Calling some interpretive method “our law” might suggest that judges have an obligation to decide cases by reference to that method. But the account of judicial behavior that Baude takes to show that originalism is our law may say less about the norms of judicial decisionmaking than it says about the norms of judicial discourse. Baude’s essay highlights something significant about the way judges talk, but it is not clear that this way of talking constrains, or ought to constrain, the substance of what judges decide.
Recommended Citation
Primus, Richard A. "Is Theocracy Our Politics? Thoughts on William Baude's 'Is Originalism Our Law?'." Colum. L. Rev. Sidebar 116 (2016): 44-60.
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