Originalism

The Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause is one sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It was ratified in 1868. The Supreme Court interpreted it — clearly, and with essentially the meaning everyone has understood it to have for over a century — in 1898. Nobody seriously disputed what it meant for 128 years. On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that meaning and struck down Trump’s executive order trying to end birthright citizenship for children of undocumented and temporary-visa immigrants. That’s the good news. The bad news is what it took to get there, and what three sitting justices were willing to argue in order to reach the opposite conclusion. ...

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court has a founding myth. It goes like this: unlike liberal justices who impose their policy preferences onto the Constitution, conservative justices are constrained by the original meaning of the text — what the Founders wrote, what the ratifiers understood. Originalism, in this telling, is not an ideology. It is a discipline. It is the difference between judges who follow the law and judges who make it up. It is a compelling story. It is also, the evidence shows, false. ...

Who Owns the Machine’s Work? AI, Copyright, and the Supreme Court’s Coming Reckoning The legal system is struggling to answer a question that would have seemed like science fiction just a decade ago: when an artificial intelligence creates something — a painting, a news article, a piece of code — who owns it? And when an AI system trains itself by reading millions of copyrighted works without permission, has it stolen something? ...