hello and nice to meet you, waiguoren,
Hello IGIT. Nice to meet you.
i don't know what Justice Thomas thinks about marijuana use. he was more of an alcoholic, if i remember correctly.
I suppose you are referencing the claims of Thomas's ex-girlfriend Lillian McEwen, who criticized Thomas on the grounds that, upon quitting alcohol, Thomas became "angry, short-tempered, asexual" and started doing "weird things" such as taking long runs in the dark before dawn. Thomas broke off the relationship with McEwen around the time she claims he went sober.
At the time McEwen went public with her claims (2010, decades after the alleged events occurred), she was seeking a publisher for her own memoir. Her credibility is worth questioning. But by all means, continue casting weakly founded aspersions.
the justices you favor seek to imagine what the framers meant, when they scribed the constitution.
Not exactly. The first step is to read the text. If the text is clear, the analysis ends. For example, the Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in lawsuits for which the value in question exceeds $20. In this case we do not, as you wrote, "seek to imagine what the framers meant". We simply read the text and follow it.
In the event that words could have multiple interpretations, we rarely need to "imagine what the framers meant." Imagination is scarcely needed to those who have made a study of the Federalist Papers, the Philadelphia convention, the ratifying conventions, the Articles of Confederation and English common law. In most cases, the framers were exceedingly clear in their intentions.
it involves a bit of guesswork, of course - since the worldview of the framers (for example, when it comes to women's rights or minority rights) would be considered barbaric in 2018.
First, this appears to be a non sequitur. Whether the worldview of the framers was barbaric has no bearing on whether guesswork should be involved in interpretation. To wit, one can easily imagine a barbaric document that is nevertheless exceedingly clear in its wording.
Second, it is a gross generalization on your part to claim that the worldview of the framers would be "considered barbaric in 2018". If you are referring to the slavery issue, you should be aware that all of the most important framers (Madison, Adams, Washington, Jefferson, Wilson, Jay, Hamilton, Paine) have been shown to be uncomfortable with slavery, and many of them (Jay, Wilson, Adams, Paine) were outright abolitionists.
Third and most importantly, the worldview of the framers is not relevant to our conversation. The job of a judge or Supreme Court justice is to faithfully interpret the law as it was written, not to probe the worldview of these men. That is a job for historians.
Meaning cannot be added to the Constitution but through the amendment process. When the Court determined in 1973 that the 14th Amendment contained an implicit "right to abortion", it was not faithfully interpreting the text of the Constitution. Instead, it imposed its view of morality on the citizens of the majority of states, who had decided through the legislative process that abortion should be illegal except when the health of the mother would be adversely affected by carrying the baby to term.
A good test for you: in your view, is capital punishment unconstitutional under the 8th Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment"?
they're both basically trying to do the same thing, walguoren.
No, IGIT, that is not true. One side seeks to interpret the text with deference to the text's authors in cases of ambiguity. The other side does the same except when it does not like the outcome, in which case new meanings are attributed to old words.
