Debating Constitutional Interpretation: Originalist Georgetown Professor Nicholas Rosenkranz vs. Liberal Stanford Professor Pamela Karlan

Though the debate has a lot of legal back and forth and the liberal attempts to couch her views in some sort of coherent legal theory, the bottom line is that she openly admits that if she were to oppose a future President Sarah Palin nominee to the Supreme Court it would be based simply on the nominee having the "wrong views." She then admits that if they were to say that "I am an originalist" that she would "not have a response to that... [I]f you really are an originalist...I don't have a response to that other than to say I don't like your method because I think you ought to also look at changed social understandings... but if you are uninterested in precedent and you are uninterested in popular understanding of the term than I don't have anything to say to you... Of course I would say to people to vote against a Constitutional nominee who is against your Constitutional vision, but beyond that I don't know what I can say." What she could say is what Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to William Johnson in 1823: "On every question of construction, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed."
To watch the debate for yourself visit http://www.acslaw.org/node/17012. Tweet