If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fixate on It: Gadamer, Gedicks, and Original Public Meaning

Abstract

In The “Fixation Thesis” and Other Falsehoods, Professor Frederick Mark Gedicks argues that public meaning originalists are mistaken in their claim that the Constitution today means just what it meant when it was adopted. Unlike living constitutionalists who say that the document’s meaning has changed to keep up with the times, Gedicks denies that we have unmediated access to an original public meaning relative to which we could even identify or measure departure. Leaning on a theory of hermeneutics developed by philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gedicks takes aim at the fixation thesis—Professor Lawrence Solum’s term for the proposition that the meaning of any constitutional text was fixed at the time of its adoption.

Keywords: Frederick Mark Gedicks, Gedicks, originalists, Constitution, constitutionalists, hermeneutics, hans-georg Gadamer, fixation thesis, Lawrence Solum, constitutional text