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Jeff Broadwater, Gary L. McDowell. The Language of Law and the Foundations of American Constitutionalism., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 3, June 2013, Page 845, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.3.845
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Dedications usually do not tell readers very much. Not so in The Language of the Law. Gary L. McDowell dedicates his book to, among others, Robert H. Bork, the controversial judge and legal theorist whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in 1987. Bork championed “originalism,” the belief that the United States Constitution ought to be interpreted to reflect the intent of the framers as revealed in the text of the document. McDowell suggests Bork's defeat was “an unforgivable political and constitutional sin,” and his book is an extended, scholarly defense of Bork's favorite cause (p. 1). In McDowell's words, “[t]he thesis of the book is that there is a moral foundation to originalism when it comes to the interpretation of a written constitution, the natural rights legitimacy of which rests upon the consent of the governed” (pp. xi-xii).
To McDowell, the alternative to originalism is the supposedly now prevailing idea of a living document that evolves in accord with “the moral intuition” of judges applying a higher law (p. 9). According to McDowell, “the Founders' Constitution began to disappear” under the influence of late nineteenth-century academics (p. 12). Three professors take much of the blame for its demise. Christopher Columbus Langdell's introduction of the case method of instruction at Harvard Law School fed an assumption that judges made, and could change, the law. Two Princeton University political scientists, Woodrow Wilson and his even more influential successor, Edward Corwin, openly embraced the idea of a Constitution that adapted to changing times.
