Originalism

In the context of United States constitutional interpretation, originalism is a way to interpret the Constitution's meaning as stable from the time of enactment, and which can only be changed by the steps set out in Article Five of the Constitution. The term originated in the 1980s. Originalism is based on formalist theory, and when applied to meaning, is closely related to textualism.

Today, originalism is popular among some political conservatives in the U.S., and is most prominently associated with Justice Clarence Thomas, 2017 Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch, Justice Antonin Scalia, and Robert Bork. However, some liberals, such as late Justice Hugo Black and legal scholar Akhil Amar, have also subscribed to the theory.

Originalism is an umbrella term for interpretative methods that hold to the "fixation thesis"—the notion that an utterance's semantic content is fixed at the time it is uttered. Originalists seek one of two alternative sources of meaning:

These theories share the view that there is an identifiable original intent or original meaning, contemporaneous with a constitution's or statute's ratification, which should govern its subsequent interpretation. The divisions between these theories relate to what exactly that identifiable original intent or original meaning is: the intentions of the authors or the ratifiers, the original meaning of the text, a combination of the two, or the original meaning of the text but not its expected application.

Bret Boyce described the origins of the term originalist as follows: The term "originalism" has been most commonly used since the middle 1980s and was apparently coined by Paul Brest in The Misconceived Quest for the Original Understanding. It is often asserted that originalism is synonymous with strict constructionism.

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