This month's feature at Liberty Law Forum is by Richard Epstein, discussing his recent book The Classical Liberal Constitution. On originalism, he writes:
The best elements of constitutional originalism are keenly aware of the dangers associated with the view that any word can have whatever meaning that the justices, the legislators or the president decide to give it. They know that without some check on this exercise, the effort to find a principled basis for limited government will necessarily fail. There is much to be said in favor of this view, so that it become in my view utterly untenable to claim, for example, that the term “commerce” is broad enough to encompass agriculture, mining and manufacture, when in ordinary English the term is used in opposition to these three kinds of activities that our Constitution designedly left to the control of the States. In similar fashion, it is not possible to read the term “private property” as though it encompasses only the right or exclusive possession to land, animals or chattels, when the term has always been used in both common and Roman law —the Framers were far from ignorant to the classical tradition—to cover the rights of use, within the boundaries of nuisance law, and the right of disposition whether by sale, lease, mortgage or gift.
The constant effort to expand the meaning of commerce and restrict the meaning of private property are key components of the Progressive agenda, by combining an expansion of federal power with a contraction of the domain of protected private rights in the second. A faithful originalism is on solid ground when it resists the constant effort to redesign terms so as to turn a classical liberal constitution into a modern progressive one, without going through the process of formal amendment. More generally, there is no necessary connection between the conservative insistence on judicial restraint and classical liberal theory. A Constitution drafted by defenders of limited government should not by interpretation be converted into an open-ended charter of government power.
If the originalists are on sound ground on this issue, they are on far weaker ground if they think that the close examination of the written text, standing alone, is sufficient to unlock the meaning of general constitutional provisions. It is at this point, that the defenders of judicial restraint show insufficient respect to the well-developed interpretive tradition that treats any constitutional text as creating the initial presumption whose gaps are filled in by a conceptual analysis that links the basic textual provisions to the larger constitutional purposes of limited government. These ends are, of course, the control of force and fraud, the common defense, and the provision of public goods, such as roads and other infrastructure, whose creation was contemplated under the Constitution.
Posted at 6:41 AM