Progressives may be in for a surprise when, as all the Wise Heads expect. Katanji Brown Jackson settles into the Supreme Court. The only revealing response that I heard in the garbage-filled grandstanding confirmation hearings was her answer to Senator Grassley’s question whether “ the Constitution is an evolving, ‘living” document that changes over time.”
Judge Jackson replied, “I do not believe that there is a living Constitution in the sense that it is changing or infused with my own perspective or the policy perspective of the day,” thereby earning a backhanded compliment from the Republican Senator, who later said she had ” done a good job of sidestepping important questions,” “ (Des Moines Register)
It was a crafty answer. She saw the trap – if she accepted the “living” metaphor, she would leave herself open to accusations of interpreting at whim or on the basis of ideology, not the law as written...
We’ll see over time what she meant by her reply. Is she really an “originalist” in the Scalia mold, as her phrasing might invite one to assume? We’ll see.
While we are waiting, there’s time to cross-examine this concept of living, v. non-living, a.k.a dead, texts. Is that the best American jurisprudence has to offer?
Granted, interpretation of old texts is never easy. We Classicists know that all too well. It’s hard enough to determine an author’s meaning in his own context, one separated from us by centuries or a even millennia.. Then, context changes. What happens then? Do we call in the coroner to pronounce the document no longer alive, - dead, dead as a door nail.? Dead as a dead language? And, here’s the rub, dead and hence no threat to the status quo? That’s why some people are frightened by “living” texts.
Classicists, it seems to me, can point to better ways of thinking about the interpretation of text written log ago but still claiming to speak to our present condition - es aiei, as Thucydides phrased it.
Thucydides? There’s a text that plays leapfrog with context. . Change the context in which it is read and one sees it in a new and more revealing light. Live through the reign of a demagogue, experience Covid, witness an invasion, watch brutality and its specious rationales. and at every turn new light flashes from the text. Why didn’t I see that before?, I fondly ask.
Certain texts, the Constitution is one, I believe, refuse to be confined to one context. They leap boundaries. Are they inexhaustible? We’ll see. In the meantime, , Let’s call them classics. and learn from them.
Judge Jackson replied, “I do not believe that there is a living Constitution in the sense that it is changing or infused with my own perspective or the policy perspective of the day,” thereby earning a backhanded compliment from the Republican Senator, who later said she had ” done a good job of sidestepping important questions,” “ (Des Moines Register)
It was a crafty answer. She saw the trap – if she accepted the “living” metaphor, she would leave herself open to accusations of interpreting at whim or on the basis of ideology, not the law as written...
We’ll see over time what she meant by her reply. Is she really an “originalist” in the Scalia mold, as her phrasing might invite one to assume? We’ll see.
While we are waiting, there’s time to cross-examine this concept of living, v. non-living, a.k.a dead, texts. Is that the best American jurisprudence has to offer?
Granted, interpretation of old texts is never easy. We Classicists know that all too well. It’s hard enough to determine an author’s meaning in his own context, one separated from us by centuries or a even millennia.. Then, context changes. What happens then? Do we call in the coroner to pronounce the document no longer alive, - dead, dead as a door nail.? Dead as a dead language? And, here’s the rub, dead and hence no threat to the status quo? That’s why some people are frightened by “living” texts.
Classicists, it seems to me, can point to better ways of thinking about the interpretation of text written log ago but still claiming to speak to our present condition - es aiei, as Thucydides phrased it.
Thucydides? There’s a text that plays leapfrog with context. . Change the context in which it is read and one sees it in a new and more revealing light. Live through the reign of a demagogue, experience Covid, witness an invasion, watch brutality and its specious rationales. and at every turn new light flashes from the text. Why didn’t I see that before?, I fondly ask.
Certain texts, the Constitution is one, I believe, refuse to be confined to one context. They leap boundaries. Are they inexhaustible? We’ll see. In the meantime, , Let’s call them classics. and learn from them.