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The Bradwell one is a low key entrant for most alarming.

Probably, but my intuitions on this are related to the broader question of "legitimacy" which originalists seem to think flows from rigorous method, while I, (naive outsider) think is far more a story of ex post rationalization.

On this point, I suspect we'll just disagree. I just reread the essay and it seems clear to me that he's talking about evidence of what the meaning of jurisdiction was when it was written. At the very least, the essay is happy to accept any and all spare legitimacy that originalism can offer it.

I think this strategic choice to police the boundaries of originalism to seek to deny legitimacy is defensible. I'm a pluralist about strategy in a complex and fallen world. But, game or not, I'm observing a) that there are rules, and b) that those rules are maintained by insiders FOR insiders.

This is different from lots of other fields of study! I've never heard a local gov person insist that someone talking about local gov is "not really doing local gov." That sentence doesn't even make sense!

My broader point is that originalism and its boundaries are the inventions of originalists. Which makes originalism very difficult to critique from the outside. It is both totalizing (in the sense that we're "all originalists now") and exclusionary (only some of us are originalists).

I'd also add that it seems to me (again as an outsider) that the litigation of what is "true" originalism is part of the insider's game of originalism. I assume that Wurman and Lash are "true" originalists while Hamburger is not? Or are they no longer "true" if they persist in being wrong?

From an outsiders perspective, I see Hamburger seeking authority in past meaning in precisely the ways that I find so unappealing about originalism. To the extent that he's open to making presentist policy arguments, I prefer that!

This is all fair enough, but still internalist! If you read his essay, he's clearly seeking access to originalist claims to legitimacy (talking about original meanings of jurisdiction, citing originalists). For you to say it's not originalist is assert that this adjacency is not "really" originalist

Ok, but to an outsider, this feels like quibbling. It suggests that this is a core of "true" originalism that's distinct and distinguishable from either "false" originalism, or originalist adajcent argument. But if originalism is a mode of discourse rather than a methodology, this breaks down.

Probably shouldn't have said it was careful or measured...fair enough.

I think the internal quibbling over what is "real" originalism and what is only adjacent is part of the problem honestly. If you read the post, he's citing self-idenitifed originalists and talking about the original meaning of jurisdiction. I don't see him trying to escape that discourse at all.

Perhaps fair on the careful point -- but it's steeped in a background culture of originalism. In other words, it's a product of originalism as a mode of thought, even if it's not, itself, an "act" of originalist scholarship.

For more on this, see: An Originalist Relation to the Universe open.substack.com/pub/postcard...

2) Even if good history could give us better originalist answers (again, it won’t), originalism would remain a deeply unappealing way to think about law and our constitution. open.substack.com/pub/postcard...

An Originalist Relation to the UniverseAn Emersonian Polemicopen.substack.com

No worries. This is a Wawa/sheetz level rivalry. Locally significant, otherwise illegible.

Father worship is right. There’s a whole other Jerome Frank essay lurking in here.

100% agree that it is worth resisting the primacy and authoritarianism of originalism. But, I'm a pragmatist and I think that what resistance means and what strategy means are complex questions in context.

Thanks. I know you’ve been in the front lines of this!

Very glad you wrote it. Even if it slightly preempts an essay I'm struggling to put together on similar themes.