Original Intent

When I am driving in the afternoon I often like to listen to Hugh Hewitt. He has a great attitude (although he is idiotic and a bit envious about USC). He has a mix of issues and discussions including a regular segment where he gets a liberal (Erwin Chemerinsky - Duke - formerly of USC) and a conserrvative ( John Eastman Chapman) professor to discuss legal issues. This afternoon Chemerinsky again raised the question of original intent. He argued in the following fashion - he found it hard to understand how anyone could claim that the founders could anticipate the changes that have happened since the constitution was originally written. But if you think of the constitution as a contract (which indeed it is) that leap is not at all hard to make. If I wrote a contract for the delivery of one case of whiskey in 1787 to be delivered 50 years hence - I could not claim in 1837 that the contract was for 5 cases.

The brilliance of the Constitution is its ability to meet the needs of the current time in the process of amendment. If something needs to take into account modern conditions, then amend the document.