Among followers of the federal judiciary, Justice Elena Kagan is known nearly as well for one line of congressional testimony as for anything in her judicial opinions. In her confirmation hearing in 2010, she answered a question about constitutional interpretation by saying, in part, of the Founding Fathers that “we apply what they say, what they meant to do. So in that sense, we are all originalists."
That would have been a shocking statement from a Democratic president's nominee just ten years ago, and surprising even from a Republican nominee had it been made a generation earlier. When the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote A Matter of Interpretation in 1998, his defense of originalism and textualism was still a minority view. Twenty years on, the victory is not complete, but it is clear that the tide has turned toward reading the text of the Constitution as having its original public meaning. The average student of constitutional law knows about originalism and likely understands it to some extent, even if the average law professor does not.
One problem with such a sea change — and it's a good problem to have — is that it has become hard to explain why originalism was ever not the leading theory on constitutional interpretation. And, once we start to ask that question, others are bound to follow from it. These queries find their answer in Ilan Wurman's A Debt against the Living: An Introduction to Originalism. As the subtitle suggests, Wurman, an assistant professor at the Sandra Day O'Connor College of Law at Arizona State University, intends his book to do what many law professors will not: explain the roots of originalism and why it represents the best method of interpreting the Constitution.
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