Originalism, the school of constitutional interpretation currently modish among conservative lawyers and judges, is not so much an idea as a legal-industrial complex divided into three parts—the academic, the jurisprudential, and the political. In its first part, originalism is an academic pursuit, one that a large number of law scholars have embraced with gusto. A […]
Judging is, in fact, far more like carpentry than like science. Indeed, a judge interpreting a constitution in its third century is like a carpenter called in to renovate some part of an early Federal-era house. I have hired skilled craftspeople to do renovations on my house; I did not ask them to imagine their perfect house and then to tear down the parts of mine that don’t conform to that imagination. Scientists needed counter-theories to replace the idea of phlogiston or of the heliocentric universe; carpenters don’t need a theory of building. They need skill, care, well-maintained tools, and immemorial techniques to build on the level and the square.
Interesting analogy.