It should become the philosophical shot heard ’round the country. In a remarkable speech that received far too little attention, former Supreme Court Justice David Souter took direct aim at the conservatives’ favorite theory of judging.
Souter’s verdict: It “has only a tenuous connection to reality.”
At issue is “originalism,” an approach to reading the Constitution whose seeming precision has given conservatives a polemical advantage over the liberals’ “Living Constitution” idea that appears to let judges say our founding document means whatever they want it to mean.
Justice Antonin Scalia, the court’s leading orginalist, summarized his opponents’ attitude toward the Constitution with four words: “You know, it morphs.”
Now, thanks to Souter’s recent commencement address at Harvard, Scalia’s critics have fighting words of their own. Souter, who did not mention Scalia by name, underscored “how egregiously it misses the point to think of judges in constitutional cases as just sitting there reading constitutional phrases fairly and looking at reported facts objectively to produce their judgments.”
The problem is not only that “constitutions have a lot of general language in them in order to be useful as constitutions,” but also that the U.S. Constitution “contains values that may very well exist in tension with each other, not in harmony.”
This means that “hard cases are hard because the Constitution gives no simple rule of decision for the cases in which one of the values is truly at odds with another.”
Souter attacked the fatal flaw of originalism — which he relabeled the “fair reading model” — by suggesting that it would have led the Supreme Court in 1954 not to its Brown vs. Board of Education decision overturning legal segregation but to an affirmation of the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson ruling upholding “separate but equal” public facilities.
“For those whose exclusive norm of constitutional judging is merely fair reading of language applied to facts objectively viewed, Brown must either be flat-out wrong or a very mystifying decision,” Souter said.
“The language of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection of the laws did not change between 1896 and 1954, and it would be very hard to say that the obvious facts on which Plessy was based had changed,” Souter argued. “Actually, the best clue to the difference between the cases is the dates they were decided, which I think lead to the explanation for their divergent results.”
Yes, the Supreme Court changed because the nation’s understanding of race changed.
While conservative scholars such as Michael McConnell have constructed ingenious arguments to show how originalism could accommodate Brown, it’s hard to see judges guided by that doctrine reaching as boldly as the 1954 Warren court did.
Souter is right to say that “the Constitution embodies the desire of the American people, like most people, to have things both ways. We want order and security, and we also want liberty. And we want not only liberty but equality as well.”
Because these desires clash, courts are “forced to choose between them, between one constitutional good thing and another one.” Souter’s view admits that this is what judges do. Originalists pretend they’re not choosing. Which approach is the more trustworthy?
