The Tom Woods Show, episode 1343.

Prepare to set fire to the index card of allowable opinion.

Your daily dose of liberty education starts here, the Tom Woods Show.

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in minutes at policygenius.com. Hi, everybody, it's Tom Woods, and today we are going through a number

of important themes in the development of American law over the centuries. Very lightly because

there's so much material here, but still enough

to wet your appetite so that perhaps you will want to go learn more. And my guest today is

Stephen Presser, who is Professor of Legal Studies Emeritus at Northwestern University's School of

Law. He's also taught at Rutgers, the University of Virginia, and University

College London. He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and is a graduate of Harvard Law School

and was twice a Fulbright Senior Scholar at University College London. He is Legal Affairs

editor of Chronicles Magazine and the author of the book we're going to be talking about today,

law professors, three centuries of shaping American law.

And I just want to make sure, I bet most people listening know what it means,

but we will use terms like originalism.

And I don't want people who are new to this stuff to be left in the dust.

So by originalism, we generally mean that the Constitution ought to be interpreted with reference to its original intent.

Now, within originalism, there's a diversity of opinion because there are other people like Randy Barnett following in the tradition of Lysander Spooner.

When Lysander Spooner was writing about the unconstitutionality of slavery, they would speak about original meaning that forget

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