Maggie's Farm

Constitution: Dead or Alive?

Balkin has a piece in Slate claiming that no-one really believes in a dead, or static, Constitution. I think he's made a straw man here to make some points, but it's an interesting piece: 

The specific metaphor of a living, evolving Constitution arose in the 1920s to explain how a broad view of federal power that came with World War I (and later, the New Deal) was consistent with the American constitutional tradition. The Constitution's words, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote in 1920, "called into life a being" whose "development … could not have been foreseen completely by the most gifted of its begetters." Hence we must interpret our Constitution "in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago."

Read entire.