One of my favorite movies of all time is Being There—Jerzy Kosinsky’s great spoof with, for me, a serious message. Peter Sellers plays Chance the gardener, who morphs into Chauncey Gardiner through a mishearing. Tossed out of his employer’s home into a world he had never experienced, his encounter with it produce a series of misadventures that eventually have his name whispered as a potential presidential candidate. He simply advances through his new outside life by being there, doing his own innocent thing. But it’s the interpretations to his simplistic comments by the several other characters in the film that… Read More
Continue ReadingJustice Is Not Blind
This post expands upon the previous one. Justice cannot be found in a text. Neither originalism nor textualism can result in justice, except by chance. Full stop. Justice cannot be found in the past. It lives only in the present moment. Justice exists only when the right systemic conditions allow it to come forth. Justice belongs to the same class of qualities as does beauty or fairness. Justice always depends on the contextual whole of the place and time it is to be found. Further, what is right cannot be found wholly in a text, Rightness, like justice, is a… Read More
Continue ReadingOriginalism and Textualism Are Hoaxes
Amy Coney Barrett said in her Senate testimony that the Constitution has “the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it.” No. The Constitution Document and the words it contains have no meaning at all. A piece of text has as many possible meanings as there are people reading it. Only humans can create meaning from texts or spoken words. That is true of individual words and the sentences made from them. Much mischief has been done by conflating the written or spoken word with some inherent or essential meaning. The founding document “doesn’t change over time,” Barrett… Read More
Continue ReadingOriginalism and Textualism Are Hoaxes
Amy Coney Barrett said in her Senate testimony that the Constitution has “the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it.” No. The Constitution Document and the words it contains have no meaning at all. A piece of text has as many possible meanings as there are people reading it. Only humans can create meaning from texts or spoken words. That is true of individual words and the sentences made from them. Much mischief has been done by conflating the written or spoken word with some inherent or essential meaning. The founding document “doesn’t change over time,” Barrett… Read More
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