In response to: How Constitutional Originalism Promotes Liberty
I would like to start by thanking Law and Liberty for hosting this symposium, and Hadley Arkes, Peter Lawler, and Ed Whelan for their thoughtful comments on my initial essay. I had planned to complete this reply much earlier. But just as constitutional originalism sometimes has difficulty taking account of new developments, so my original intent was upended by the arrival of an addition to the family. However, the issues raised in this symposium remain current and should continue to be so for some time to come. Despite our considerable differences, there are some important areas of agreement between the three…
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In his famous, breakthrough speech at the Cooper Union in New York, Lincoln remarked on those black slaves who had not thrown in with John Brown. Even though, as he said, they were “ignorant”—even though they had no formal education—they had the wit to see that the schemes of this crazy white man would not…
Ilya Somin’s thesis in his Liberty Forum essay is modest and hedged. Confining himself to “the circumstances of the United States for the foreseeable future,” he argues only that, among the “plausible competitors,” originalism is “likely to be” the theory of constitutional interpretation that best protects the components of “ ‘negative’ liberty defended by most…
The point of Ilya Somin's able and humane Liberty Forum essay is to show libertarians how to deploy originalism as a doctrine to maximize “negative liberty” in America. He doesn’t claim to establish that negative liberty is good, or that its maximization accords with living in the truth or with dignity. It’s enough to say…