Word: intentionally
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Original intent has a strong gravitational pull," acknowledges Columbia Law Professor Henry Monaghan. But how specific an intent are we looking for? Today's interpreters of the Constitution, for example, would never tolerate the brutality of the criminal punishments that were prevalent 200 years ago -- brandings, say, or the puncturing of nostrils. Notes Federal Appeals Court Judge Irving Kaufman: "I regard reliance on original intent to be a largely specious mode of interpretation. I often find it instructive to consult the framers when I am called upon to interpret the Constitution. But it is the beginning of my inquiry...
...there is any matter on which the original intent of the founders is clear, it is the issue of slavery. Says Columbia Law Professor Jack Greenberg, former director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund: "The original Constitution not only accepted slavery, but it gave the South a bonus for it" -- the stipulation in Article I, Section 3 that in apportioning Representatives for the House, "three fifths of all other persons" should be added to the "whole number of free persons...
Among other things, he offers a timely reminder that debate over the intent of the framers began with the framers themselves. Consensus on the virtues of the Constitution was slow to build and subject to rupture over passionate issues such as slavery and workers' rights. In 1843 the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison termed the document a "Covenant with Death and an Agreement with Hell." Early in this century, historians like Charles Beard tried to brand its provisions the work of a privileged few seeking to defend their property. The document was not made, one Beard follower wrote, "by the kind...
...while some say overseers power has declined, they add that it need not be enlarged. "Their role is not really a role of power, but it's a role of providing information and advice," says former Overseer T. Jefferson Coolidge '54, a local financier. "In terms of the original intent of the overseers, they don't have enough power to do the original job, but they probably have all the power they can handle given the limited time they have...
...American failure to analyze Marshall's vision goes beyond economic and political miscalculation. How much of the prestige that attaches to the Marshall Plan is really a misunderstanding of its genesis and intent? The Plan itself provided only a broad sketch; among its most important guiding principles was pluralism, a willingness to let the Europeans experiment with both private enterprise and socialism in their recovery efforts. It was the Plan's lack of ideological rigidity that made it so profoundly useful...