# Question for originalists. Was the Supreme Court wrong in Brown?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-originalists-was-the-supreme-court-wrong-in-brown/567275>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [January 11, 2011, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-originalists-was-the-supreme-court-wrong-in-brown/567275 "2011-01-11T23:11:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![smileybastard](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/b3f665/32.png) [@smileybastard](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smileybastard)\
**Post date:** [January 15, 2011, 5:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-originalists-was-the-supreme-court-wrong-in-brown/567275/21 "2011-01-15T17:04:10Z")

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What the court did was perfectly valid. Saying these schools have been in existence a long time is meaningless. Women didn’t have the vote for ever either. The fact is that the schools are discriminatory and there is no bona fide for that discrimination. That is all there is.

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**Author:** ![Laudenum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7993a0/32.png) [@Laudenum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Laudenum)\
**Post date:** [January 18, 2011, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-for-originalists-was-the-supreme-court-wrong-in-brown/567275/22 "2011-01-18T21:56:04Z")

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> [@TriPolar](#):
>
> Originalism is claiming that dead people meant to write down something other than what they did, and you know what they intended to write down, and that should be substituted for what they did write down. Every form of it boils down to that. It’s a crock.

As I understand originalism, you take what they write down, but you view it in the context of the day.

There was a time when if I claimed to be making love to a maiden, I would be writing her poetry - nowadays, I’m just too gentlemenly to say bone.

In the same way, I understand originalism as attempting to look back at the intentions of the drafters of your constitution (the Irish one is fairly new so there isn’t the same disconnect though historicism has been used many times) and interpreting the words in a rational manner based on the same.

Is it any less of a crock than some of the more bizarre interpretations that have been reached by other jurisprudential methods?  
If we’re honest, I don’t think you can ever say that there is one, pure method of jurisprudence - different methods are appropriate at different times, and in different proportions.

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