Balkinization  

Sunday, February 25, 2024

The Dynamic Politics of Living Constitutionalism

Richard Primus

 Today I served as a guest judge giving feedback for several teams of public high school students in a competitive program in which the students make arguments about topics in constitutional law.  One of the teams argued that the Supreme Court should sometimes depart from the original meaning of a constitutional provision in light of the modern world’s changed ideas and conditions. 

Their example of a case in which the Court properly departed from an original meaning in this way was SFFA v. Harvard/UNC.  The students conceded that an originalist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment would permit affirmative action on behalf of a disadvantaged racial minority group but argued that the Court was correct to rule affirmative action unconstitutional today.


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