At Concurring Opinions, Gerard Magliocca: The Spirit of the Constitution, raising this point:
Recently I’ve been asking myself this question: What do people mean when they refer to “the spirit of the Constitution?” It’s a phrase that was used by John Marshall in M’Culloch v. Maryland and which shows up in a lot of Supreme Court opinions. Originally it was probably a play on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, which was influential in the eighteenth century. But what does the phrase mean now?
Posted at 6:29 AM