In 2022, the Supreme Court‘s conservative majority held in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that the meaning of the 14th Amendment is framed by the law in 1868, when the amendment was ratified.
But on June 30, in Trump v. Barbara — the ruling that narrowly affirmed birthright citizenship — two conservative justices took notably different views about the 14th Amendment and its relationship to other laws of the time. Those contrasts show the subjectivity that surrounds the allegedly objective concept of “originalism” in constitutional interpretation.
