Scalia thought this preposterous. The Constitution, he said, is “not a living document. It’s dead, dead, dead.”1 He believed, or said he believed, in originalism:2 the Constitution meant only what he understood it to have meant to the men who wrote it, at the time at which they wrote it. As such, while all sorts of protections might be read into the glittering language on the page, Scalia found them absent in the minds of the document’s authors and thus absent from the law.
