Monday, December 12, 2022

Solum at Balkinization. I added the links. I have to laugh

A third wave of progressive originalism is now well underway.  Justice Jackson is already the de facto leader of a group of scholars, lawyers, and judges who understand the dangers that judicial supremacy and living constitutionalism pose to democracy and equality—given the reality that conservative justices will dominate the Supreme Court for at least a decade or two.  Justice Jackson’s originalism is a direct and forceful response to the conservative justices’ increasing reliance on a selective mix of history, tradition, and precedent to undermine the original meaning of the Constitution’s text, while claiming to be “originalists.”

Ironically, the fiercest critics of progressive originalism are not conservatives.  Instead, it is progressives themselves who have gone on the warpath.  Prominent examples include “Originalism is Bunk,” by Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, “Worse than Nothing,” a slender monograph by Erwin Chemerinsky, and “Resisting Originalism, Even When ‘Done Well,’” a post on the Yale Journal of Regulation’s Notice and Comment Blog by Lisa Heinzerling.  What these critics and their many supporters share is an opposition to Justice Jackson’s embrace of originalism’s progressive potential, both as a counter to conservative living constitutionalism and as the key to unlocking the emancipatory power of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Solum, in 2003.

[T]he distinction between high politics and low politics .... [is a] conjuring trick. If the universe consists of decisions that are either high politics or low politics, then it's all politics. But it isn't all politics. The crucial distinction is not between political decisions that favor your ideology and those that favor your party. It isn't even between political decisions that are based on general principles you believe in and those which adopt principles you abhor to get to the results that you like. The crucial distinction is between decisions that are based on the law--on things like texts, history, and precedent--and decisions that are based on politics.

Solum, 2022

Douglass’s devastating criticism of Dred Scott was simple: it is the public meaning of the constitutional text and not the racist intentions of some of its authors that must be treated as the binding source of constitutional law. 

What's the public meaning of the 14th Amendment?

All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

"[I]n 1867 Congress passed a law providing relief for “freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia,” to be distributed under the auspices of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular importance in the late 1860s was the Bureau’s operation of schools for blacks, to the point that black children in the South were often better educated than their white counterparts."

[See the link for Justice Jackson, below.]

repeats 

I think this is when I emailed Balkin telling him he was always far too polite, and he replied defending honey over vinegar.  11 years later we got "Why are Americans Originalist?" and Kill'em with Kindnessall too coy by half.

And of course the new originalists are now defending Judicial review!

Originalism is a rhetorical device. That liberals now embrace it while conservatives oppose it is just more proof. Supreme court justices are political appointees, and Jackson is another lightweight, mediocre mind. Solum's not much better.

Old reference, with a new link this time. 
"The Persons Case and the living tree theory of constitutional interpretation."

On 18 October 1929, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council ruled that women were legally eligible for appointment to the Senate of Canada. The judgment was written by Lord Sankey, the reform-minded Lord Chancellor appointed by Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. Lord Sankey departed from a long line of cases and proclaimed an organic and progressive theory of constitutional interpretation. The British North America Act, 1867 (2) had, according to Lord Sankey, planted in Canada "a living tree capable of growth and expansion within its natural limits." This allowed him to rule that "the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours."

The Privy Council's decision, popularly known in Canada as the "Person's Case", was a bold legal step that reverberates to this day as a proclamation of equality and universal personhood, and as a guiding principle of constitutional interpretation.
Koppelman is still struggling to find ways to back away from previous commitments

And one more rom Balkin. A symposium on Tanya K. Hernández, Racial Innocence: Unmasking Latino Anti-Black Bias and the Struggle for Equality. 

The only "racial innocence" is the innocence of white narcissists, and wannabes, and every author at Balkinization who claims rights to land in the Middle East. Many Latinos are racist. They'll tell you that themselves.
  

Back and forth, again and again.

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