Originalism

In the context of United States law, originalism is a concept regarding the interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding of the authors or the people at the time it was ratified. This concept views the Constitution as stable from the time of enactment, and that the meaning of its contents can be changed only by the steps set out in Article Five. This notion stands in contrast to the concept of the Living Constitution, which asserts that the Constitution is intended to be interpreted based on the context of the current times, even if such interpretation is different from the original interpretations of the document. The term originated in the 1980s. Originalism is an umbrella term for interpretative methods that hold to the 'fixation thesis', the notion that an utterance's semantic content is fixed at the time it is uttered. Originalists seek one of two alternative sources of meaning: