Jill Lepore

And I I take for granted the good faith with which they undertake their work.

I I'm unpersuaded by it as a means of jurisprudence.

I am entirely certain it is.

not original.

And I would also state with some authority that neither is it history.

It really has very little to do with history because the methods that judges use when they write originalist opinions are the methods of the law.

It's not like, oh, what can be known about this in the world?

It's like what the sources that originalists will use to determine the original meaning of the constitution or its intention or whatever.

The Constitution itself, the text, the records of ratifying convention, James Madison's notes on the Constitutional Convention, and the Federalist Papers, and maybe a dictionary.

But from the point of view of a historian, you would never artificially bound your source material.

If I had a historical question about, if I wanted to understand...

You know, the Biden years as a historian, like and I said, well, I'm going to actually look at the White House visitors logs and the text of Biden's press conferences.

And then Jill Biden wrote a diary.

And that's all I'm going to look at.

Like you learn a lot about the.

biden white house with those three sources but it would be just bizarro world like that's you know that's a d like okay like like like if you if you want to understand the biden white house or the biden presidency there's just that's just not how you would go about it and and and maybe that's unfair and that like the sources that originals use are the very definitive sources about you know what the what the people who are in philadelphia in 1787 may have thought but

But since the whole premise of the Constitution was that it is the spirit of the people, you surely, like, when I try to tell the story of Philadelphia in 1787, you're interested in what they would have called at the time the people out of doors.

All the people who are basically, you know, knocking on the windows and banging on the doors with their ideas about what should be in the Constitution.

There's just like a whole big world out there.

So that's why I would say, like,