> There are two major schools of thought about how one should interpret literature, and I prefer the one that suggests the context in which something was writte

> There are two major schools of thought about how one should interpret literature, and I prefer the one that suggests the context in which something was written should be taken into consideration (the other school, which happens to dominate departments of English Literature, is kind of nutty). The Constitution is not literature, and this confuses the goals of law interpretation and literature interpretation. When interpreting the law, we are trying to find the meaning of the law. The "author is dead" school of analysing literature has a different method not because they are nutty, but because they have a different goal: not to divine some true meaning of the text, but to understand the experience of reading the text -- something which is completely irrelevant to the law. The only reason that anyone could think that a "textualist", context-free interpretation of the law makes sense is that the US was founded relatively recently. Older countries have no choice to deal with the fact that meanings change, and that the law makes no sense if we pretend it was written today.