Question

Passage A
The ascendance of rigid textualism—the doctrine that statutory and constitutional interpretation must be confined exclusively to the public semantic meaning of the words at the time of their enactment—represents a profound impoverishment of legal epistemology. Its proponents frequently champion this method as an indispensable, objective bulwark against judicial overreach, arguing that it prevents unelected judges from imposing their personal policy preferences under the guise of interpretation. Yet, this approach assumes a deeply flawed and static model of language, presuming that semantics remain perfectly crystallized and unambiguously decipherable over the span of centuries. More crucially, strict textualism ignores the documented historical reality of the founding era: the constitutional architects deliberately employed expansive, open-ended terminology—such as "equal protection," "due process," and "unreasonable searches"—precisely to accommodate the inevitable normative evolution of a rapidly developing republic. They understood that no single generation could anticipate the myriad technological and social transformations that would subsequently reshape the nation. To bind contemporary jurisprudence strictly to eighteenth-century semantic constraints is, therefore, not merely to misread the document's inherent structural flexibility, but to actively subvert the framers’ conscious design of a living, adaptable framework. Ultimately, if the constitutional project is to remain a legitimate instrument of governance, judicial interpretation must necessarily incorporate an evolving understanding of societal values rather than remaining imprisoned in a lexical time capsule.

Passage B
Textualism’s primary appeal among modern legal theorists lies in its purported guarantee of objectivity; by tethering constitutional interpretation strictly to the lexicon and linguistic conventions of the founding era, the methodology claims to definitively strip the judiciary of subjective, ad hoc policymaking. However, this methodological conceit relies on an anachronistic and fundamentally flawed historiography of American legal origins. The framers themselves were deeply steeped in a robust natural law tradition, an intellectual paradigm that presupposed the existence of unwritten, universal moral imperatives which were universally expected to guide and constrain judicial reasoning. Within this eighteenth-century epistemological framework, the drafters did not view the written text as the exhaustive, self-contained repository of all legal meaning. Rather, the Constitution was conceived as a formalized, though necessarily incomplete, reflection of deeper, antecedent rights that existed independent of their codification. By elevating the dictionary definitions of isolated clauses above all other jurisprudential considerations, modern textualists engage in a bizarre historical projection. They retroactively impose a mechanical, sterile formalism upon a generation of jurists and philosophers who would have viewed such semantic obsession not as a virtue, but as a severe dereliction of the court’s fundamental duty. To the founders, the highest calling of the judiciary was the exercise of reasoned moral judgment in the application of the law, a task that inherently demands looking beyond the mere ink on the parchment.

Both authors would be most likely to agree with which one of the following statements regarding the original drafters of the Constitution?