Debates over constitutional originalism almost always center on meaning. Questions are typically focused, concentrated on the meaning of particular constitutional clauses at the moment of their inception: the Commerce Clause in 1787, the Second Amendment in 1791, or the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Given the prevalence of these investigations, theoretical and methodological debates over how to recover original constitutional meaning are concentrated on either the kind of meaning that should be targeted—original public meaning, original intended meaning, or original legal meaning—or how that meaning can be recovered—through conventional legal reasoning, corpus linguistics, or thick reconstruction of historical context. Regardless, virtually all originalist theories of meaning uncritically presuppose the nature of the object possessing that meaning: they take as given what the Constitution itself is and, by implication, what it has always been. Although it might not be clear what the Constitution originally meant, it is straightforward what the original Constitution originally was. It just is the Constitution.

中文翻译：

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书面宪政，过去和现在

关于宪法原旨主义的辩论几乎总是集中在意义上。问题通常集中在特定宪法条款在其开始时的含义上：1787 年的商业条款、1791 年的第二修正案或 1868 年的第十四修正案。鉴于这些调查的普遍性，理论和方法论辩论关于如何恢复原宪法意义的问题集中在种类应针对的意义——原始公共意义、原始预期意义或原始法律意义——或如何这种意义可以通过传统的法律推理、语料库语言学或对历史背景的厚重重建来恢复。无论如何，几乎所有原旨主义的意义理论都不加批判地预设了具有该意义的对象的性质：他们将宪法本身的内容视为既定的是并且，通过暗示，它一直是。尽管可能不清楚宪法最初的含义，但原始宪法最初的含义是直截了当的。它只是是宪法。