Originalism as Identity
Last Thursday night at a conference at the University of Florida devoted to originalism attended by lawyers, academics, students, federal judges, and the entire Florida Supreme Court, Judge William Pryor, the Chief Judge of the 11th Circuit, gave the keynote address. He told the audience that he had been on the bench for several decades, that he is and always was an originalist, that he had written hundreds if not thousands of decisions, but that he only had to “wrestle with the original meaning of the Constitution in four cases.” He also said that “inferior” courts such as his are bound by non-originalist Supreme Court cases until the justices change them, and that most of his job in the constitutional arena is to apply Supreme Court precedent. He used the word modest repeatedly to describe the proper mindset for federal judges. I thought it fascinating that one of the most famously originalist judges in the country, who self-identified that way long before it was cool to do so, sai