roachboy

bear....

so you are in fact working from a strict construction viewpoint, more or less?
you reproduce the terminology of that school in your response, so i assume this is accurate.

two questions:

from the gist of your reponses, it seems to me that you can't have it both ways--you cant at once be complaining about the effects of precedent (which i assume you object to because you don't like them individually, and that on political grounds) and then say something vague about the importance of precedent in enabling the constitutional system in its present for to adapt to changing circumstances.
because it seems to me that the central question strict construction needs to address is the status of precedent--sometimes (here i woudl include your posts) it seems like the desired result of strict construction would be to turn the unitesd states into a civil-law based tradition--one in which precedent had no official status relative to the constitutional framework itself

but that would be an extremely radical shift--for starters, it would require a fundamentally different type of legislative process at the level of bill writing--and it would also entail a total revolution in the status of judges, who would be reduced to functionary status.

and i think it safe to say that no-one would want such a system--including yourself i would wager.

so you get these vague references in the direction of common-law tradition and its basic feature, which is precedent as an extension/adaptation of the general principles outline in the constitution, with various checks in place to keep things from running too far into contradiction with those principles. but everything about your position as i understand it (and i am pushing you back into strict construction because i dont see anything that seperates you from it) would seem to be opposed to precedent and its current relation to the constitution.

the second question is easier to formulate. you, bear, have no idea whatsoever of the intent behind this post. how the hell does it get easier to figure out intent when you are trying read the constitution through the intent of the framers? how could you possibly do that? do you assume that an elect gets messages at seances from madison et al? or do you really think that intent is easy to determine? if the former, at least your position would make sense. if the latter, the most basic aspects of the method behind original intent/strict construction is a total joke, unworkable at the level of theory, arbitrary at the level of practice.
what i think is central to original intent is that the objects of speculation about intent have been dead for a couple hundred years and so arent around to tell you or anyone else that they are wrong.
so what it comes to is arbitrary interpretations the weight of which would rely on the personal authority of the person making the interpretation.
and that, bear, would be about the most authoritarian style of legal "analysis" i could imagine.

but do you see this otherwise?
how?

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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