Talk:Original intent

Original Intent versus Original Understanding

I am not the right person to write teh articles on this, because I can't be sure of how to frame it in a fair and full way, but there really should be a fuller account of "originalism". "Originial Intent" is the attempt to understand what the framers intended with particular text. It suffers from many many problems, like, for example, the fact that different framers thought different things about the same text. A "committee" does not always have a single unified intent. That led to the development of the "original understanding" school of thought. Under that paradign, you do not concern yourself with the disparate intent of everyone involved in drafting and ratifying the text, but you attempt to discern what a hypothetical "reasonable man" (who has had legal training) would have interpreted the text to mean at the time it was ratified. (This approach has the advantage of not relying on "legislative history" in statutory interpretation, because the "reasonable man" is presumed not to have access to it...In effect, Congress can't rely on legioslative history to sneak in an interpretation not set forth clearly in the text of the law itself.) Judge Bork, the ideological grandfather of modern originalism has spoken at length on the issue of why Original Understanding is the superior way to analyze constitutional and statutory provisions. --JesusSaves 05:52, 11 March 2007 (EDT)

The problem with Original Intent is that while the Founding Fathers were possibly the single smartest group of people ever assembled under one roof, there's no possible way they could have anticipated things like cloning, nuclear weaponry, or computers. --Gulik 06:08, 11 March 2007 (EDT)