Interpreting the Constitution

David Singh

Date of Award

2007

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Lewis, Eugene

Keywords

Constitution, Scalia, Antonin, Breyer, Stephen

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

How to interpret the Constitution of the United States of America has consistently been a difficult political, moral, social, and legal debate since the foundation of the country. Current Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Breyer have each entered the debate offering ideological frameworks that I demonstrate here to be too minimalistic and narrow to prove sufficient. Furthermore, I argue that valid interpretations of the Constitution manifested in Supreme Court decisions have not been able to deal with difficult constitutional issues, such as obscenity as a limit of constitutionally protected speech, according to the values to which the Justices claim fidelity. Thus, this thesis offers a novel understanding of the Constitution, in which continual change is argued to be necessary to the ongoing revalidation and re-interpretation of the document, and which the Constitution is seen as both a document and process, and, being irreducible to either, actualizes itself via the connections each case makes to external forces, actions, and bodies in American society.

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