"It is time... to end the long-standing and unproductive methodological debate over 'originalism' versus 'dynamism' or 'evolution' and focus instead on how, as a substantive matter, we should interpret the Constitution in the twenty-first century, and what it has to say on questions unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers"
About this Quote
Wood is trying to retire a culture-war proxy fight that has turned constitutional interpretation into team sports. By calling the originalism-versus-living-Constitution clash "long-standing and unproductive", she’s not neutrally diagnosing a stale debate; she’s delegitimizing it as an organizing frame. The move is strategic: if the frame is the problem, then the people most invested in it are suddenly defending process over outcomes, method over governance.
Her pivot to "as a substantive matter" is the tell. Judges often insist they are referees, not policymakers, but Wood leans into the reality that interpretation always cashes out in consequences. She’s arguing that the honest question is not which label you wear, but what interpretive tools you deploy when modern life (digital surveillance, reproductive technology, administrative governance, climate regulation) collides with eighteenth-century text and assumptions.
The line "unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers" is doing double duty. It rebukes a romanticized founder worship that treats historical intention as an all-purpose answer key. At the same time, it reassures institutionalists: she’s not advocating freeform moral readings; she’s acknowledging a mismatch between old language and new problems that any serious method must confront.
Context matters: as a federal judge writing into a legal ecosystem where "originalism" has become both a jurisprudence and a political brand, Wood’s plea is also a bid to reclaim legitimacy. If courts are going to decide high-stakes disputes in the twenty-first century, she suggests, they need an interpretive posture that can explain itself to the present without pretending the past already solved everything.
Her pivot to "as a substantive matter" is the tell. Judges often insist they are referees, not policymakers, but Wood leans into the reality that interpretation always cashes out in consequences. She’s arguing that the honest question is not which label you wear, but what interpretive tools you deploy when modern life (digital surveillance, reproductive technology, administrative governance, climate regulation) collides with eighteenth-century text and assumptions.
The line "unimaginable to our eighteenth-century Framers" is doing double duty. It rebukes a romanticized founder worship that treats historical intention as an all-purpose answer key. At the same time, it reassures institutionalists: she’s not advocating freeform moral readings; she’s acknowledging a mismatch between old language and new problems that any serious method must confront.
Context matters: as a federal judge writing into a legal ecosystem where "originalism" has become both a jurisprudence and a political brand, Wood’s plea is also a bid to reclaim legitimacy. If courts are going to decide high-stakes disputes in the twenty-first century, she suggests, they need an interpretive posture that can explain itself to the present without pretending the past already solved everything.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|
More Quotes by Diane
Add to List
