Rowe on Constitutional Interpretation

As a follow up to yesterday's post on competing constitutional interpretations, take a look at Jon Rowe's post on originalism and textualism. He writes:

I consider myself to be both an originalist and a textualist. Yet, I also believe that because certain parts of our Constitution were deliberately written in broad generalities, our Founders purposefully built flexibility into the document and intended it to be interpreted through the lens of law and life as understood by the present generations facing the particular case in controversy in question. I know my position generally isn't associated with "originalism," but I don't see any evidence that our founders desired us to impute 18th Century sociology, complete with all of its prejudices, when applying a broad and general provision of the Constitution to a specific present day, factual circumstance. I call myself an "originalist" because, for reasons I will explain, I think our Founders did not specifically intend us to be "time-bound" by 18th Century historical context.

I think Jon strikes a pretty good balance, one similar to my own, between formalism and realism. There is a reasonable middle ground between the (ostensibly) rigid formalism of a Bork or Scalia (though I don't believe either of them is nearly as formalist as they pretend to be) and a ridiculous postmodernism on the other end that would say that words have no meaning at all aside from political interests. I soundly reject both ideas, but I find the postmodern view to be entirely useless, while finding that textualism and both forms of originalism are at least among the tools of interpretation that we must use.