Originalism in the Year Three Thousand

Abstract

While procrastinating from grading at the end of the Spring 2024 semester, a series of mishaps led to my inadvertent teleportation to the year three thousand, where I found myself attending a conference consisting of top originalist legal scholars. This essay recounts what I was able to gather about the state of constitutional interpretation in the centuries to come and applies these insights to current quandaries over how to classify modern courts’ interpretive methodology.

Keywords: constitutional law, time travel, constitutional interpretation, originalism, common law constitutionalism, the event

JEL Classification: K1, K10, K19