the fact that the document contained some uncertainties does not mean the Constitution was not finished. Rather, drafters of the Constitution knew and expected that a rich background of legal interpretative rules would be employed to resolve these uncertainties.
Lawyers seek the best way to interpret the meaning of a written text. Historians are more interested in the motives of those producing it and the causes that led to its creation.
according to Gienapp, the United States Constitution was not predominantly conceived to have a fixed or complete meaning at the time it was enacted. Like the British constitution, it provided an outline of fundamental law, but that outline was intended to be filled in and even evolve over time.
only after important debates in the early republic (principally over the Bank of the United States, the removal of executive branch officials, and the respective powers of the Senate and House as to treaties) did there come to be a consensus that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed.
If the Constitution’s meaning was not originally intended to be fixed and only came to be understood as fixed through nonoriginalist practice, then originalism itself was a nonoriginalist innovation, and possibly illegitimate.
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