On Inkblots and Truffles

In Originalism: Standard and Procedure, Professor Stephen Sachs makes yet another important contribution to the literature. Sachs defends originalism by making its purpose more modest. Drawing on Professor R. Eugene Bales and the ethics literature, Sachs argues that originalism should be assessed as a standard of correctness, not as a procedure for finding the correct answer. In other words, originalism "picks out a destination, not a route." Or put differently, originalism tells people whether the Fourteenth Amendment protects X or Y, not how to go about determining the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, X or Y. And importantly, the standard-procedure distinction shows why it's unfair to criticize originalism for failing to offer easy answers or even easy methods for finding answers. That criticism, Sachs concludes, is not the point of originalism as a standard of correctness.