Departing from constitutional text leaves judges with no principled stopping point.

Evidence

“Once we depart from the text of the Constitution, just where … do we stop? The most amazing feature of the Court’s opinion is that it does not even purport to give an answer… Evidently, the governing standard is to be what might be called the unfettered wisdom of a majority of this Court, revealed to an obedient people on a case-bycase basis.” — G. Alan Tarr, Judicial Process and Judicial…, 2636

Categorization

• DEFINE: Articulates the textualist/originalist critique of open-ended interpretive standards — the classic anti-discretion argument in the legal-interpretation debate.
• QUESTION: Is there a defensible stopping rule once a court moves past text, or is every such move an act of judicial will?