originalist

[uh-rij-uhn-uhl-ist]

noun

1. U.S., Law.,  a person who supports or is guided by originalism.

adjective

1. U.S., Law.,  supporting, arising from, or relating to originalism.

Example Sentences

His co-author was Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice whose strict originalist readings of the Constitution paved the way for the court’s recent reversal of precedents on abortion, voting rights and gun laws.

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As you note elsewhere, that isn’t what originalist judges should do—or what the Founders wanted.

Read more on The Wall Street Journal

When President Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987, it seemed a historical turning point: the moment when the court would end its decadeslong progressive trajectory and turn in a more conservative, originalist direction.

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But his most famous decisions departed completely from the originalist jurisprudence of Bork and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, as well as the generation of conservative judges that developed in their wake.

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Conservatives denounced these cases and many more as profound violations of the Constitution’s words and as betrayals of the originalist methodology that conservative judges and lawyers had labored to create.

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