Posner Sees End Of Originalism

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will be remembered for, among other things, ushering in an era of Constitutional thought known as Originalism. After Scalia’s death, University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner writes, only one Originalist justice remains: Clarence Thomas. The other members of the Supreme Court “don’t care about Originalism, at least not in the sense that Scalia did,” he writes. “They may be receptive from time to time to arguments about the original understanding of this or that clause, but they clearly don’t think of such arguments as dispositive or even particularly weighty.” That will lead lawyers to stop filling their legal briefs with Originalist arguments, and the academic argument for interpreting the Constitution as the founders of the U.S. intended it will fall to legal academics.