Orthodox Originalism and Conservative Identity after Ken Kersch

by Logan Everett Sawyer III

Abstract

By demonstrating that originalism was only the tip of the iceberg, Ken Kersch’s Conservatives and the Constitution pushes us to ask what the relationship has been between originalism and that submerged mass of conservative constitutional theorizing since the 1980s and how it may be changing today. Kersch’s core claim—that originalism’s impact on the creation of the Reagan coalition has been exaggerated—is a convincing and important scholarly contribution. But the substantive insights and methodology of Conservatives and the Constitution suggest that originalism may have played a different, and more important, role after its ascension to the official interpretive theory of the Republican Party.