One of the great scholars of the American Constitution from a historical perspective was David Currie. Here is a short excerpt from the Green Bag and the University of Chicago Law School Record about Currie's views on originalism.
PAUL A. CLARK: You have said that in the early nineteenth century everyone agreed that “the Constitution should be interpreted in accordance with the Framers’ original intentions” and yet one of your colleagues, Geoffrey Stone, recently called originalism a “vacuous ideology.” From your reading of the constitutional arguments in the period when everyone was an originalist, how would you respond to Professor Stone?
DAVID P. CURRIE: My first response is that I am simply reporting what I have discovered: It is an interesting historical fact that most interpreters up until the Civil War (I have gone no farther) believed the Constitution should be interpreted according to the intentions of the Framers. Beyond that, I think the fact that so many people believed it suggests they just may have been right. After all, they were closer to the Framers than we are. If they thought the original understanding important, it may be the Framers did too. This approach also squares with what Blackstone, the Framers’ mentor, said about statutory interpretation: Laws should be construed so as to accomplish their purpose. Both Story and Marshall, of course, said the same thing about the Constitution. More fundamentally, I don’t see how one can claim to be interpreting the law if one ignores what we know about what it was intended to mean. If we grant that the Framers had the right to make law to bind us in the future, it seems to me that assumption requires us to try to carry out their intentions, which they could only express in often ambiguous words. “Vacuous” means, among other things, empty. If the point is that the historical record doesn’t contain all the answers, I would readily agree; that seems to me no reason for disdaining such help as one can derive from the existing materials – such as the Sedition Act debates of 1798, which contain in condensed form the whole modern theory of freedom of speech.
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