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44 Syracuse L. Rev. 631 (1993)
Constitutional Interpretation

handle is hein.journals/syrlr44 and id is 641 raw text is: CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION Lino A. Gragliat The central question of constitutional law is the proper role of the Supreme Court in our system of government. Specifically, to what extent should the Court have a policy-making (legislative) role as well as a judicial role. This question is conventionally put in terms of how should the Court interpret the Constitution because the only warrant for the Court to intervene in the political process to disallow policy choices made by elected representatives of the people is that it is merely interpreting and enforcing the Constitution. When the Court nullifies a legislative or other official act, it does not say it does so because the Justices disapprove of the policy choice made; the Court says it does so because the policy choice is disallowed by the Constitu- tion. The question therefore arises as to how the Court should inter- pret the Constitution: should it interpret it to mean what it was intended to mean by those who made it authoritative, or should the Court be free to interpret it on some other basis? The first thing to note is that this is an entirely misleading and incorrect characterization of the issue. The real issue is not as to how the Court should interpret the Constitution, but whether it should confine itself (or be confined) to interpreting the Constitution in fact as well as in theory, rather than being permitted to make constitu- tional rulings on some non-constitutional basis. To interpret a docu- ment simply means to attempt to determine what its author or authors intended to convey. There is, after all, a difference between reading and writing, and between composing and interpreting: To write is to attempt to communicate with others through language in written form; to read or interpret is to attempt to understand what others have attempted to communicate by their words. We can define and use words as we wish (unfortunately), but it is difficult to see t A. Dalton Cross Professor of Law, University of Texas, Austin. This article was adapted from Professor Graglia's lecture delivered as part of a symposium on Interpret- ing our Constitution, held at the Syracuse University College of Law on November 11, 1992. The symposium was sponsored by the Federalist Society Lawyers Division: Cen- tral New York Chapter and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Byrn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

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