(CLP) Conservatives and the Law

A piece in the current Chronicle of Higher Education surveys the remarkable success of the conservative Federalist Society in dominating the judiciary: http://chronicle.com/article/How-Conservatives-Captured-the/138461/
Of interest for our purposes is the Society's official "originalist" view of constitutional interpretation, "... exemplified by the jurisprudence of Justice Scalia. That view posits that to interpret the Constitution, one must search for the original meaning of its provisions. The argument is that the original meaning of words may be objectively determined by recourse to historical sources that reveal how the words were used at the time, and that the original meaning is the only legitimate method of interpreting the document."