The Supreme Court has been in the news a lot lately. In the last few years, the court has overturned Roe v. Wade, ended affirmative action and reduced the power of federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce regulations. This has been in large part due to a conservative-appointed majority — six of the nine justices — that has been characterized by a willingness to overturn precedent and enforce its ideology.
So what exactly makes this court so willing to challenge precedent?
The answer seems to lie in a legal philosophy called originalism, which is what some justices may use to interpret law, according to an analysis from SCOTUSblog in 2025 on the 2024–25 Supreme Court term. Originalism posits that judges should interpret the Constitution according to its original meaning. In practice, this places a large emphasis on historical interpretation, and often results in judges citing laws and letters from the 19th, 18th and sometimes even 17th centuries.
It’s for this reason that originalist philosophy is extremely flawed. This emphasis on the “original meaning” of the Constitution usually limits interpretation of the law to 19th- and 18th-century perspectives while also failing to understand the purpose of the document.
Many of the most important parts of the Constitution were written before 1870, when the last of the Reconstruction Amendments were passed. To this day, much of the debate around the Constitution comes from amendments that were written around or well before the Civil War.
This creates a real problem because originalists attempt to solve these debates through worldviews contemporary to the time they were written. These perceptions are oftentimes completely different than the ones we have today. Let’s not forget that the same men who wrote our Constitution also owned slaves, rejected universal suffrage and viewed women as property.
These views were normal at the time, but today they rightfully horrify us. It should also horrify us that our Supreme Court might think we should interpret the Constitution according to the views of these men.
Thankfully, through the efforts of generations of activists, at various times in our history we have passed changes to the Constitution. Some of these changes guarantee equal rights for women, criminalize slavery and protect minorities, and our modern society wouldn’t function without them.
Many of these protections, however, were created 100 to 150 years ago. These amendments were progressive for the time, but if we examine the original intent, they don’t necessarily align with how we view them today.
The Equal Protection Clause, passed as part of the 14th Amendment in 1868, says that individuals should be treated equally under the law. Today, we use it as the basis of equality between sexes, races and ages.
But at the time, the authors of this clause only intended to prevent the rights of newly freed slaves from being infringed. Because of this original intent, originalists have previously argued that the creators never intended to create equality of the sexes, and thus, women should not be legally equal to men.
The problem is that originalists misunderstand the purpose and philosophy behind the Constitution. Originalists pretend the purpose of the Constitution is to represent the intent of the Founding Fathers. This completely ignores the fact, however, that these same Founding Fathers believed the Constitution should change to appropriate the ever-changing needs of the people.
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The Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his treatise, “The Social Contract,” where Rousseau argued that laws should express the collective interests of the people. This philosophy is deeply reflected throughout the founding documents of our nation.
Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that governments derive their powers “from the consent of the governed.” He also believed laws should evolve according to the people’s needs, famously saying, “The earth belongs to the living, not the dead.” He and other Founding Fathers wrote that each generation has the right to create and interpret laws according to their needs; originalists simply ignore this.
When originalists interpret laws according to the beliefs of 18th-century slave owners, they are directly contradicting the words of the Founding Fathers they claim to hold in such high regard. By interpreting the law in this way, they ignore the context of both history and modernity and show a deep lack of respect for the people they represent.
The Supreme Court is in desperate need of change, or at the very least, some undergraduate philosophy classes.
Ethan Foster is a sophomore philosophy and economics double major from Newcomerstown, Ohio. He is an Opinion writer for The Miami Student and plans to be a student ambassador to the Philosophy Department.
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