Anyone who picks up a recent volume of the United States Reports or a prominent legal journal will be sure to find judges and lawyers debating, in agonizing detail, the meaning of a particular word or phrase in the Constitution. Marshaling late-eighteenth century dictionaries and legal treatises, records of debates from the drafting and ratifying conventions, and well-thumbed copies of the Federalist Papers, modern constitutional interlocutors will scrutinize text, structure, and history to discern an inherent logic. Above all, although disputants will endlessly contest what a particular provision means, they largely agree on what the Constitution itself is: as Jonathan Gienapp puts it in The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era, “an artifact circumscribed in time and space,” the “fixed Constitution” that we have been collectively dissecting since the late 1780s (10).

中文翻译：

---

宪法的终结

任何阅读最近一卷《美国报告》或著名法律杂志的人都一定会发现法官和律师正在就宪法中特定单词或短语的含义进行痛苦的详细辩论。整理 18 世纪后期的字典和法律论文、起草和批准公约的辩论记录以及翻阅过的《公约》副本联邦党人文件，现代宪法对话者将仔细审查文本、结构和历史，以辨别内在逻辑。最重要的是，尽管争论者会无休止地争论一个特定的条款是什么方法, 他们在很大程度上同意宪法本身是: 正如乔纳森·吉纳普所说第二次创造：在建国时代修正美国宪法，“时间和空间限制的人工制品”，自 1780 年代后期以来我们一直在集体剖析的“固定宪法”（10）。