Original Meanings

"The best way to reconstruct the original meaning of documents that we still interpret today is to come up with a method of analysis that looks very carefully at different sources and how much those sources are worth. The framing debates involved a relatively small group of men deliberating on a day-to-day basis. Once the Constitution was published, anybody could say anything about it. The ratification debate was just as wide open as our own political debate, quite different from the closed-door debates. In my book, I spend a lot of time distinguishing the original intentions of the framers from the original understandings of the ratifiers. I try to explain why any intelligent analysis of the Constitution’s original meaning would have to look at both and think critically about each form of evidence. I try to give the historian’s answer to the lawyer’s question. I submitted a brief in the District of Columbia vs Heller case, from three years ago. That was the case in which the Court struck down a 32-year-old handgun ban as incompatible with the Second Amendment. I think there are intellectual embarrassments of the first order in Justice Scalia’s opinion. He wholly ignores the history of how the Second Amendment got adopted. He makes things up that did not happen the way he hypothesises. But I’m a historian and he’s a justice . I’m a private citizen and he’s a public official. I think I have better footnotes, but he has a vote on the Supreme Court."