I thought I'd add a brief addendum to one of Mike Ramsey's responses to Erwin Chemerinsky, who claims that the use of "he" in the Constitution would limit the presidency to men if the Constitution's original meaning were binding. As Mike explains just below, historically male pronouns were used to refer to both men and women. But in fact male pronouns are a great example of why reading the Constitution according to its meaning today is sometimes absurd. To the extent that language has evolved so that today "he" really only refers to men and we would need to say "he or she" to refer to both men and women, the Constitution has a presidential gender classificiation only if we think today's meaning is binding. If we think that would be absurd, we should prefer original meaning.
MIKE RAMSEY ADDS: This is a great point. I wish I'd made it.
Posted at 8:26 AM