#originalism — Public Fediverse posts

The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/09/the-seance-court-original-intent-and-the-fraud-of-speaking-for-the-dead/

The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/09/the-seance-court-original-intent-and-the-fraud-of-speaking-for-the-dead/

The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/09/the-seance-court-original-intent-and-the-fraud-of-speaking-for-the-dead/

The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/09/the-seance-court-original-intent-and-the-fraud-of-speaking-for-the-dead/

The Séance Court: Original Intent and the Fraud of Speaking for the Dead

https://bolesblogs.com/2026/07/09/the-seance-court-original-intent-and-the-fraud-of-speaking-for-the-dead/

Secularism got so afraid of sounding like religion that it surrendered the concept of justice. Originalism filled the void. That's the argument — and it lands. via @bledewitz.bsky.social

https://onlys.ky/cannot-let-fear-of-god-belief-poison-law-politics/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=evergreen

#Secularism #ConstitutionalLaw #MoralPhilosophy #Politics #Originalism

#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.” 
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools. 

After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.

She decided to convert not long before her marriage.

The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.

Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.

During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.

Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.

It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/opus-dei-leonard-leo-supreme-court-moneybags-kid-1235115538/

#Leonard #Leo was born on Long Island in the mid-sixties.
When he was only a toddler, he lost his father — a pastry chef — to cancer.
At the age of five, his mother remarried, and the Leos moved to New Jersey, where he attended Monroe Township High School.
Leo was chosen as the “Most Likely to Succeed”
a distinction he shared with classmate #Sally #Schroeder, his future wife.
In the yearbook, the two were shown sitting next to each other, holding wads of cash and with dollar signs painted on their glasses.
He was so effective at raising money for his senior prom that his classmates nicknamed him the “Moneybags Kid.” 
Throughout his life, he remained steeped in the deep Catholicism of his grandfather, who had emigrated to the United States from Italy as a teenager;
his grandparents attended Mass daily, and encouraged the young Leonard to follow their lead.
After high school, Leo went to Cornell University, studying under a group of conservative academics in the university’s department of government
and with the wider national backdrop of iconoclastic scholars led by Yale University’s #Robert #Bork and the University of Chicago’s #Antonin #Scalia, who were building the case for a novel legal doctrine known as #originalism.
He got a series of internships in Washington, D.C., during the final years of the Reagan administration,
then returned to Cornell to join the law school, where in 1989 he founded the local chapter of a student organization called the #Federalist #Society.
That group had been set up by three conservative-leaning students from Yale, Harvard, and Chicago seven years earlier as a way of challenging what they saw as the dominance of liberal ideology at the country’s law schools. 

After graduating, Leo married Sally, who had been raised as a Protestant but who used to go to Catholic Mass five times every weekend because she played the organ.

She decided to convert not long before her marriage.

The couple moved back to Washington, where Leo clerked for a judge on the court of appeals and became close with another appellate judge who had recently been appointed to the D.C. circuit
— a man from Georgia called #Clarence #Thomas,
who had toyed with becoming a Catholic priest.

Despite being ten years older and from much more humble origins,
Thomas shared Leo’s conservative outlook, and the two soon developed a deep friendship that would endure for many years.

During this period, Leo was asked by the Federalist Society to become its first employee
— although he delayed his start date so that he could help his good friend Thomas through his contentious confirmation process for the Supreme Court.

Despite accusations of sexual harassment hanging over him, Thomas won Senate confirmation by a slim margin.

It would be the first in a series of fights in which Leo would have to put aside the teachings of his Christian faith as he focused on the greater goal of pushing through a conservative revolution of the courts and of society at large.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/opus-dei-leonard-leo-supreme-court-moneybags-kid-1235115538/

Once Again, #Originalism’s Hollow Core Is Revealed. In #rahimi #SupremeCourt #SCOTUS made the right decision for the wrong reasons. #domesticviolence #SecondAmendment #2ndamendment #gunviolence #courts #constitution #guns #originalism #billofrights #unqalifiedcommand #restrainingorder United States #CourtofAppeals for the #FifthCircuit #lawtrappedinamber https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/06/failure-originalism-supreme-court/678783/ read free https://archive.is/GJziP

@tzimmer_history

I'm glad someone has written about this. I haven't read the book, but I'll add to my list of possibles.

About originalism, my own feeling is this: In the most literal interpretation, originalism, at least as practiced, would be perfected if the amendment process were nullified and courts were never allowed to set precedent. That's what originalism seems to be saying. And yet that can't be.

The founders knew they were not doing it all right. They gave us a living system, one capable of responding to changing needs, so that society didn't outgrow itself. This was a great insight and perhaps the most important of the original thoughts, though not part of originalism.

A literal take on originalism would unroll women's right to a vote or the right of African Americans to be 100% people at all. That's preposterous in any sane modern understanding and to assert that this is the proper interpretation of law now, especially after having fought the Civil War over this, is improper.

More generally, originalism fights the ability to patch holes in the system. As a computer person, I see it precisely the same as an insistence that the only true version of a piece of software is version 1.0, the originally released code. To me, the amendment process of the Constitution is the service agreement, the ability to stay up to date with fighting later-discovered vulnerabilities. No one would want to use a piece of software that is not protected in this way. Our government, in my mind, is no different.

The originalists are basically just hackers bent on breaking in and controlling the system, and their tool is to convince people that maintenance is bad and to use Jedi mind tricks to convince people to allow them to unroll security fixes. Again, just preposterous.

This relates as well to Stare Decisis. I'm busy writing a blog post on that today, so I'll try to link it here if I finish it, but the importance of stare decisis and the utter violation of civil society that SCOTUS is presently engaged in by tearing it to shreds is something I think the populace does not generally understand.

In brief, and I'll try to write this better in the blog, stare decisis is not just an old decision that SCOTUS is entitled to label as "wrongly decided". It is part of a societal conversation that says "this will be the default unless Congress acts". But over time, through inaction, it becomes law because the inaction says loudly "no action was needed, the public is doing fine". This is very critical to society because we do not need a bunch of laws that just say "Yeah, what SCOTUS said." The way we say that is to not change the decision.

So when SCOTUS overrides a long-standing thing, they are not just saying "this was decided wrong" but also "the fact that society has seen the decision and allowed it to stand is of no importance to us".

That is as undemocratic as overturning actual legislation. It is the ultimate in adverse and inappropriate judicial action. They see it as "this was and is in our realm" but the proper way to see it is as a conversational offering to say "tell us we're wrong", and they don't interpret the silence as having involved the other branches. It is not now in their realm.

So I agree originalism is a trap, though I'd be fascinated, if I can find the time, to read someone else's analysis of it, which probably hits other things I haven't thought of.

By the way, I am not a lawyer, but I don't think only lawyers need opine. This is about what We The People want our world to be, and every one of us is equally entitled to opine on that, notwithstanding what the Supreme Court says. Indeed, the Supreme Court and all government derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but right now they are actively engaged in making sure the public has no ability to give consent. In effect, they are staging a coup-by-process. So while legal scholars may opine differently than I have, I stand by my right to have an equal position as just one voice of many in our democratic society. The strength of my words should be in the strength of my argument, not the strength of my credential.

#law #SCOTUS #originalism #democracy #StareDecisis #software #BugFixes #maintenance #exploits #hackers #society #freedom #consensus

@tzimmer_history

I'm glad someone has written about this. I haven't read the book, but I'll add to my list of possibles.

About originalism, my own feeling is this: In the most literal interpretation, originalism, at least as practiced, would be perfected if the amendment process were nullified and courts were never allowed to set precedent. That's what originalism seems to be saying. And yet that can't be.

The founders knew they were not doing it all right. They gave us a living system, one capable of responding to changing needs, so that society didn't outgrow itself. This was a great insight and perhaps the most important of the original thoughts, though not part of originalism.

A literal take on originalism would unroll women's right to a vote or the right of African Americans to be 100% people at all. That's preposterous in any sane modern understanding and to assert that this is the proper interpretation of law now, especially after having fought the Civil War over this, is improper.

More generally, originalism fights the ability to patch holes in the system. As a computer person, I see it precisely the same as an insistence that the only true version of a piece of software is version 1.0, the originally released code. To me, the amendment process of the Constitution is the service agreement, the ability to stay up to date with fighting later-discovered vulnerabilities. No one would want to use a piece of software that is not protected in this way. Our government, in my mind, is no different.

The originalists are basically just hackers bent on breaking in and controlling the system, and their tool is to convince people that maintenance is bad and to use Jedi mind tricks to convince people to allow them to unroll security fixes. Again, just preposterous.

This relates as well to Stare Decisis. I'm busy writing a blog post on that today, so I'll try to link it here if I finish it, but the importance of stare decisis and the utter violation of civil society that SCOTUS is presently engaged in by tearing it to shreds is something I think the populace does not generally understand.

In brief, and I'll try to write this better in the blog, stare decisis is not just an old decision that SCOTUS is entitled to label as "wrongly decided". It is part of a societal conversation that says "this will be the default unless Congress acts". But over time, through inaction, it becomes law because the inaction says loudly "no action was needed, the public is doing fine". This is very critical to society because we do not need a bunch of laws that just say "Yeah, what SCOTUS said." The way we say that is to not change the decision.

So when SCOTUS overrides a long-standing thing, they are not just saying "this was decided wrong" but also "the fact that society has seen the decision and allowed it to stand is of no importance to us".

That is as undemocratic as overturning actual legislation. It is the ultimate in adverse and inappropriate judicial action. They see it as "this was and is in our realm" but the proper way to see it is as a conversational offering to say "tell us we're wrong", and they don't interpret the silence as having involved the other branches. It is not now in their realm.

So I agree originalism is a trap, though I'd be fascinated, if I can find the time, to read someone else's analysis of it, which probably hits other things I haven't thought of.

By the way, I am not a lawyer, but I don't think only lawyers need opine. This is about what We The People want our world to be, and every one of us is equally entitled to opine on that, notwithstanding what the Supreme Court says. Indeed, the Supreme Court and all government derives legitimacy from the consent of the governed, but right now they are actively engaged in making sure the public has no ability to give consent. In effect, they are staging a coup-by-process. So while legal scholars may opine differently than I have, I stand by my right to have an equal position as just one voice of many in our democratic society. The strength of my words should be in the strength of my argument, not the strength of my credential.

#law #SCOTUS #originalism #democracy #StareDecisis #software #BugFixes #maintenance #exploits #hackers #society #freedom #consensus

There's a school of thought called originalism about the American Constitution, which says that you have to take the Constitution only in terms of what it actually says. But you know what the Constitution doesn't say? It doesn't say that you have to take the Constitution only in terms of what it actually says. That is to say the originalist position is self-contradictory because the originalist position is not actually in the Constitution.
-- Timothy Snyder

#TimothySnyder #originalism #Constitution #originalist

There's a school of thought called originalism about the American Constitution, which says that you have to take the Constitution only in terms of what it actually says. But you know what the Constitution doesn't say? It doesn't say that you have to take the Constitution only in terms of what it actually says. That is to say the originalist position is self-contradictory because the originalist position is not actually in the Constitution.
-- Timothy Snyder

#TimothySnyder #originalism #Constitution #originalist