10 - Conclusion

Summary

Nearly all of our current debates over constitutional interpretation have happened before, including those involving complex insights from linguistics, philosophy, and history that feel very modern to us. This book, while not intended to be a complete account of judicial decision making, has focused on what it has meant to interpret a legally authoritative text for many generations, and has shown how that traditional definition of interpretation maps onto the creation and interpretation of the US Constitution. It argues that constitutional theory needs to pay considerably more attention to the one constant theme through the various cycles of interpretive methods over the centuries: a search for the will of the lawmaker.