My Take | How to make money with the US Supreme Court
- Newest top justice Amy Coney Barrett’s legal literalism will likely lead to an expansive reading of the Second Amendment so loved by gun nuts in the US
What do Amy Coney Barrett, hermeneutics, postmodernism and gun rights in the United States have in common? Probably nothing for most people, but I am hoping to make a killing, no pun intended, with them from the US stock market. Sorry, greedy me!
Quite simply, you now have a gun-friendly Supreme Court, where there is a clear conservative majority ready to overturn state laws that categorically ban convicted felons from owning guns. And it’s likely that there will be a tidal wave of appeals in the US courts leading to a relaxation of gun ownership restrictions, at both state and federal levels.
But what is judicial originalism? I am no legal scholar but did study hermeneutics, a philosophy of how to interpret texts, in graduate school. The discipline was largely developed by 19th-century German legal scholars and theologians to interpret, respectively, the laws and the Bible, through rigorous textual principles.
In many ways, America is still the great wild west with all those guns
Originalism is the exact opposite of postmodernism; both fall under hermeneutics. The latter argues “there is nothing outside the text”, so the intentions and self-understanding of authors are completely irrelevant. Originalism, however, believes the intended meanings of the authors are all that matter.