Mark Joseph Stern: Ketanji Brown Jackson Joined the Supreme Court With a Big Idea [View all]
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/05/liberal-originalism-ketanji-brown-jackson-not-working.html
During her confirmation hearing in 2022, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson introduced herself to Congress as an originalist. This surprising move from a presumptively liberal justice signified to many the triumph of originalism as the accepted methodology of the Supreme Court. Jackson was following in the footsteps of Justice Elena Kagan, who famously declared that we are all originalists now during her own confirmation.
Kagan, however, came to regret that quip after watching her conservative colleagues implement a series of GOP policy preferences in the name of applying the Constitutions original meaning, which is what originalism claims to be. She is surely not the only progressive with second thoughts: The legal lefts embrace of originalism was a major influential development in the 12 years between Kagans and Jacksons elevation to the courtone thats arguably waning today, despite Jacksons appointment. After three terms of precedent-smashing activism by the Supreme Courts 63 conservative supermajority, almost always under the banner of originalism, the methodology looks more intellectually bankrupt, manipulable, and dangerous than ever.
Some liberals have responded with accusations that this supermajority peddles fauxriginalism, cherry-picking history to fit Republicans favored results. This allegation is certainly true, but doesnt answer the underlying question: Is it even a good idea to concede that the original meaning of the Constitutioneven if it could be reliably ascertainedis the authoritative one? Jacksons approach illustrates the benefits and risks of trying to beat originalists at their own game from the left. And with each passing term, the payoff looks smaller and smaller.
For progressives, the problems begin with the origin of the theory. Conservative scholars, politicians, and activists developed the idea of originalism in response to Brown v. Board of Educationyes, the decision that desegregated public schoolarguing that the Framers of the 14th Amendment would never have intended to integrate public education. They may have been right about that claim: The same Congress that proposed the 14th Amendment in 1866 segregated the District of Columbias public schools, while a supermajority of states that ratified the amendment also strictly separated education by race. That doesnt mean the push toward integration was the wrong move for our country and our 20th-century understanding of what equal rights ought to mean legally. Regardless, in the coming decades, the burgeoning conservative legal movement refined and pushed the theory to combat other contested Supreme Court decisions, including Roe v. Wade, Griswold v. Connecticut (birth control), Miranda v. Arizona (self-incrimination), Reynolds v. Sims (malapportionment), and Regents v. Bakke (affirmative action).
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