Columbia Law Review Sidebar

In Is Originalism Our Law?, William Baude has made a good kind of argument in favor of originalism. Rather than contending that originalism is the only coherent theory for interpreting a constitution, he makes the more modest claim that it happens to be the way that American judges interpret our Constitution.1 If he is right—if originalism is our law—then judges deciding constitutional cases ought to be originalists. But what exactly would the content of that obligation be? Calling some interpretive method “our law” might suggest that judges have an obligation to decide cases by reference to that method. But the account of judicial behavior that Baude takes to show that originalism is our law may say less about the norms of judicial decisionmaking than it says about the norms of judicial discourse. Baude’s essay highlights something significant about the way judges talk, but it is not clear that this way of talking constrains, or ought to constrain, the substance of what judges decide. Consider, by (partial) analogy to the way that judges talk about the Founders, the way that politicians talk about God. Invoking God is a matter of traditional and broadly accepted practice among senior American political figures. Many politicians probably feel that their role requires them to participate in that practice. But it is not clear that these invocations of God by political leaders reveal a widely held theory of political authority. The fact that senior officeholders speak about God has little bearing on the substance of policymaking, and fortunately so, because there are excellent reasons why the government should not set policy on the basis of theological ideas. To be sure, one learns something about American politics by noticing how politicians speak about God, just as one learns something about American constitutionalism by noticing how judges speak about the Founders. But it might exaggerate matters to describe our politics as theocratic, and it might exaggerate matters to describe our law as originalist.