Over the past four decades, a revolution in robes has changed the way America does constitutional law and therefore how all Americans live their lives.

Remember how mad you were after Dobbs, after Bruin?

After the Supreme Court swept away affirmative action and the separation of church and state, every one of those

developments is traceable to the near monopoly of an old-sounding but actually relatively new brand

of constitutional interpretation. The new way some justices divine the meaning of the law?

Originalism. The cases vary, but at their heart, is the same

lie, that all constitutional law is frozen in the views of white men from the founding, and that

judges can reliably decipher exactly what those men thought. At the time of its creation,

originalism promised an approach

that would encourage judicial restraint. The theory instead delivered a Supreme Court

unbound by precedent, doctrine, or even the text in history it claims to worship, wiping

away hundreds of years of common law in its wake. What's more, originalism is deadly. There's nothing

theoretical about the lives upended or snuffed out as a result of decisions delivered under the

banner of originalism, like the gun cases, Heller and Bruin, impairing the government's ability

to combat out-of-control gun violence, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade,

triggering abortion bans that deny women access to life-saving care.

Welcome to How Originalism Ate the Law, a special series here on Amicus, complimented by a package of expert pieces at slate.com

slash originalism. We're going to explore the how, the why, and the what of originalism. How,

originalism became an article of faith for the right, why the left capitulated, and what the hell are we going to do

about it? I'm Dahlia Lithwick. I cover the courts and the law and democracy for Slate.

And I'm Mark Joseph Stern, senior writer at Slate covering courts and the law. Let's go back to the

beginning. We are firing up the amicus time machine to

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