Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 28, 2025.
Over the past fifty years, historical misjudgment has become the semi-official doctrine of legal interpretation in the United States, with profound effects on American politics. Although it goes by many names, most often “originalism,” this scriptural, anti-historical doctrine has successfully claimed supreme authority as a form of historical reasoning, perfectly objective and dispassionate. Yet while originalists claim the mantle of the nation’s founders, originalism is a very recent invention, rooted in the massive racist resistance to the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1950’s, especially the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. How has this happened?
Lecture at the conference "Courage and Convictions. Practicing Judgment", June 28, 2025.
Over the past fifty years, historical misjudgment has become the semi-official doctrine of legal interpretation in the United States, with profound effects on American politics. Although it goes by many names, most often “originalism,” this scriptural, anti-historical doctrine has successfully claimed supreme authority as a form of historical reasoning, perfectly objective and dispassionate. Yet while originalists claim the mantle of the nation’s founders, originalism is a very recent invention, rooted in the massive racist resistance to the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1950’s, especially the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. How has this happened?
