In this previous post, former Solicitor General and unsuccessful Supreme Court nominee Robert H. Bork provided a handy shorthand description of the judicial philosophy of originalism. In a letter to Wall Street Journal’s ($) editor yesterday, Richard A. Epstein — the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago and the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution (previous post here) — provides an equally tidy explanation of the primary criticism of the originalist approach to interpreting the Constitution:
[Mr. Bork] is wrong to assume that his brand of originalism is the preferred form of constitutional interpretation, much less the only means to combat inherent tendency of left-wing judges to improperly expand the scope of judicial power.
