The
(old, white) guys who drafted the Constitution were well-aware of the
Common Law-- it is what informed the entire document. Since common law
principles are necessarily evolutionary in nature, they had to have
understood that those principles would inform Constitutional
interpretation, and the earliest decisions of the Supreme Court,
including Marbury, written by one of the principal authors of the
Constitution expressly acknowledged this. The notion that conflicts in
interpretation are best resolved by resort to the dictionaries that were
contemporaneous with the language in the foundational document or
subsequent statutes is the worst sort of outcome deterministic,
intellectually dishonest jurisprudence I can think of.
I have no doubt that Gorsuch and Bart's law school essays all started, "Webster's defines..." and take off from there.
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