Thank you.

[audience applauding] All right.

So it falls to me, the final speaker of the final panel of the final day, to do my best to ensure that everybody remains awake.

But that will be much easier given that I have the great pleasure of commenting on, uh, Robert George's characteristically thoughtful, um, and interesting paper, which as we've just heard, offers a considered account of the animating purpose of the Declaration of Independence, delivered principally through a close reading of the declaration's opening and most famous sentences.

Uh, and it does so to understand the conception of ordered liberty based on natural law that he argues is at the heart of the declaration.

A conception of liberty, uh, quite different, as he just emphasized, for more individualistic and permissive forms of liberty that he says have taken root more recently, and thus a conception of liberty very much in the vein of freedom for rather than freedom from, or, uh, to use Isaiah Berlin's notion, this is part of what's in the paper, but skip past famous notion of sort of positive versus negative liberty, that the founding generation had a very positive notion of liberty as opposed to a more, uh, negative one.

So I certainly agree that the American founding generation often thought of liberty more in, in, in more positive rather than negative terms, though here I would emphasize not just liberty, uh, to cultivate virtue or live a flourishing life, though those things were extremely important.

Uh-

[laughs]

And I think it gets at the, the heart of the matter.

Uh, so first wave originalism was born out of a desire to protect democracy from judicial activism, to protect the voice of we, the people, from unelected judges who are making, um, or essentially reading the argument went, their, their values, preferences, and judgments into the Constitution rather than respecting what we, the people, had actually laid down.

Well, a lot's changed since then.

We now have an originalist majority on the court, and what they would claim to justify their, um, when they strike things down is unlike the prior court, uh, which was just legislating their values.

The justices now would claim that they are enforcing the people's original meaning against current practice.

But this is, this is exactly where the things we've been talking about come so sharply into relief.

I'm in it for the legal position that people ought to be free to, like, regulate their campaigns so that we believe that we're not living in a deeply corrupted system.