As the Senate prepares to consider the Supreme Court nomination of Neil Gorsuch, an avowed originalist, William Heffernan has published a timely book on the right to privacy, a contentious issue that has bedeviled conservatives. It is a compelling read which not only traces the development of a “right” that is not expressly mentioned in the Constitution, but also analyzes the “practice of interpretive supplementation” on which it relies.
Like Gorsuch, the late Justice Antonin Scalia was also an originalist. Writing in the National Review after Scalia’s death, the constitutional scholar Jesse Panuccio wrote that Scalia “issued a clarion call for adherence to the original public meaning of the Constitution and a restoration of the proper, limited role of the judicial branch.”
