Should the song remain the same?
Writing for Time, Adam Cohen criticizes Supreme Court Justice Atonin Scalia for his opinion that the Constitution does not bar sex discrimination. In the piece, Cohen criticizes “originalism,” a judicial philosophy subscribed to by Scalia, which interprets the Constitution strictly on its plain language, as intended by the writers. Arguing for more liberal judicial philosophies, Cohen writes:
And the fact that we have a very different country now from the days of the Founding Fathers is why Justice Scalia is on the wrong side of this debate. The drafters could have written the Constitution as a list of specific rules and said, “That’s all, folks!” Instead, they wrote a document full of broadly written guarantees: “due process,” “freedom of speech” and yes, “equal protection.” As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes explained almost a century ago, the Constitution’s framers created an “organism” that was meant to grow — and to be interpreted “in the light of our whole national experience,” not based on “what was said a hundred years ago.”
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