Constitutional scholarship has deteriorated into a set of armed camps, with defenders of different theories of judicial review too often talking to their own supporters but not engaging their opponents. This book breaks out of those neat compartments and reinvigorates the debate over how the judiciary should interpret the Constitution.Keith Whittington reconsiders the implications of fundamental legal commitment to faithfully interpret our written Constitution. Making use of arguments drawn from American history, political philosophy, and literary theory, he examines what it means to interpret a written constitution and how the courts should go about that task. He concludes that when interpreting the Constitution, the judiciary should adhere to the discoverable intentions of the Founders.Other "originalists" have also asserted that their approach is required by the Constitution but have neither defended that claim nor effectively responded to critics of their assumptions or their method.This book sympathetically examines the most sophisticated critiques of originalism based on postmodern, hermeneutic, and literary theory, as wel