How Originalism Ate the Law

It happened because an entire Potemkin village of originalist academics, originalist law-review articles, originalist theories—chiefly funded by very contemporary oligarchs—was built up to present it as a reversion to the way things always were, as opposed to a revanchist attack on modernity itself; an attack on the common law itself and an assault on the idea of a pluralist, expansive vision of liberty. Originalism is a modern-day lie about history that presents itself as historical… As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has pointed out on more than one occasion, the use of history itself to erase history is now a central part of the originalist project.

— “How Originalism Ate the Law,” Slate.com
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