Text and Republican Government

Early conflicts over religious liberty and freedom of speech reveal that while we can agree on the Constitution’s text, we can profoundly disagree over the unwritten ideas we think the text represents. Debates about religion and free speech point to deeper unwritten principles that are at the very heart of America’s constitutional republic. The first debate deals with the prohibition on religious tests for office in Article VI. The second speaks to freedom of speech and press. In these early debates about religious liberty and freedom of speech, the antagonists agreed on the wording of constitutional text; they disagreed profoundly on the principles and political theory that underlie it in their understanding of America’s new republic. These early arguments reveal the importance of constructing constitutional meaning from the unwritten ideas that underlie the constitutional text.

Introduction

The Introduction reveals that all constitutional interpretation rests on unwritten ideas, and that debates about these unwritten ideas are the real source of our disputes about how to faithfully interpret the Constitution. Beginning with the most prominent Supreme Court justices who argue for textualism and originalism, the Introduction makes visible the unwritten ideas that frame their understanding of America’s written Constitution. It also reveals an important split between the political and judicial understanding and practice of interpretation based on the text and original meaning of the Constitution and the scholarly disquisition around originalism and textualism. While scholarly advocates of textualism and originalism recognize the importance of constructing constitutional meaning from sparse text, this move is denied by judges and political defenders of originalism.

The Constitution, Politics, and Public Policy

The chapter examines how constitutional law affects the nature of Irish politics and public policy. How has the Constitution, and its interpretation by the courts, influenced the choices made by the Oireachtas and by the executive in their approach to, and implementation of, public policy? The chapter argues that looking to the outcome of constitutional litigation alone provides an incomplete account of the many ways in which constitutional law and culture influence political action. Positing a more complex relationship between the constitution-as-law and the constitution-as-politics, the chapter describes how the Constitution has shaped civic and political identity in Ireland; and imposed limits on what is perceived as ‘permissible’ public policy. The chapter also explores how these limits are influenced by non-judicial actors engaged in constitutional interpretation; by public, media, or professional perceptions of constitutional meaning; and by the effects of constitutional rights provisions on power relations and political bargaining.

Written Constitutionalism, Past and Present

Debates over constitutional originalism almost always center on meaning. Questions are typically focused, concentrated on the meaning of particular constitutional clauses at the moment of their inception: the Commerce Clause in 1787, the Second Amendment in 1791, or the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Given the prevalence of these investigations, theoretical and methodological debates over how to recover original constitutional meaning are concentrated on either the kind of meaning that should be targeted—original public meaning, original intended meaning, or original legal meaning—or how that meaning can be recovered—through conventional legal reasoning, corpus linguistics, or thick reconstruction of historical context. Regardless, virtually all originalist theories of meaning uncritically presuppose the nature of the object possessing that meaning: they take as given what the Constitution itself is and, by implication, what it has always been. Although it might not be clear what the Constitution originally meant, it is straightforward what the original Constitution originally was. It just is the Constitution.

The Unitary Executive

This chapter examines the theory of the unitary executive and its deployment in the Trump presidency afgainst the specter of a Deep State. The theory asserts that the president possesses all the executive power, that the incumbent alone is the executive branch. The idea is that anything less than complete control over administration by that individual risks an obfuscation of responsibility, clouding the judgments on presidential performance that “the people” get to deliver retrospectively in the next election. This reading of the Constitution is often joined to a strikingly plebiscitary conception of American democracy. This chapter takes up two issues of special interest. The first is an alternative “republican reading” of the Constitution which anticipates inter-branch collaboration in the control of administrative power. The second is the relationship between the vesting clause of Article II, on which the unitary theory is based, and the selection procedure, which has changed radically since its original constitutional formulation. The chapter concludes by pointing to the distortions of constitutional meaning introduced by joining an expansive reading of the vesting clause to contemporary selection mechanisms.

Quarantine as a legal measure to prevent and combat infectious diseases among people

In the presented analysis, the problem of legality of the restriction of freedom of movement introduced by the quarantine in connection with the announcement of an epidemic of infectious diseases among people and the legal solutions accompanying the fight against such states, in particular the COVID-19 pandemic, has been addressed. Particular attention has been paid to the legal basis for the actions of public authorities in the field of quarantine and its types have been indicated in view of the normative basis for its introduction. Emerging doubts related to the lack of a coherent normative vision for activities necessary to effectively counteract the effects of the epidemic have been highlighted. The differences between the epidemic state and a state of exception in the constitutional meaning have been pointed out, putting forward a thesis that the solutions functioning on the grounds of the Act on preventing and combating infections and infectious diseases in humans meet the criteria set out in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland for limitations to rights and freedoms of natural persons. Thus, the obligation to undergo quarantine has a statutory basis, which means that it is a legal way of limiting interpersonal contacts due to the epidemic threat.

Anti-Modalities

Constitutional argument runs on the rails of “modalities.” These are the accepted categories of reasoning used to make claims about the content of supreme law. Some of the modalities, such as ethical and prudential arguments, seem strikingly open ended at first sight. Their contours come into clearer view, however, when we attend to the kinds of claims that are not made by constitutional interpreters—the analytical and rhetorical moves that are familiar in debates over public policy and political morality but are considered out of bounds in debates over constitutional meaning. In this Article, we seek to identify the “anti-modalities” of constitutional law and to investigate their implications. The anti-modalities both stabilize and undermine the modalities. On the one hand, they work in tandem to ensure that constitutional interpretation remains a distinctive legal enterprise. The two argument bundles are in this sense mutually reinforcing, even co-constitutive. On the other hand, by ruling out various important categories of reasoning—from general moral theory to emotional judgment to many cost-benefit calculations—the anti-modalities put continuous pressure on the modalities to accommodate such reasoning in adulterated forms, or else insist on a long distance between the inputs into supreme law and the concerns that most people care about. We call this distance constitutional law’s “resonance gap.” Such a gap arises in all areas of law, but it is especially pronounced in the constitutional realm. Although the anti-modalities play a critical role in preserving the law/politics distinction, they have deleterious consequences for each side of that line. The best response, this Article suggests, is not necessarily to narrow the resonance gap but rather to narrow the domain of constitutional law. If constitutional argument must exclude (or purport to exclude) vital modes of reasoning, we might worry less about refining its grammar and more about restricting its reach.