Against the background of the extensive and highly political debates over interpretivism and noninterpretivism, or originalism and nonoriginalism, in American constitutional theory in recent years, H. Jefferson Powell published an interesting article in 1986 that draws attention to the constitutional text in an effort to establish that, in his words, “parchment matters.” The participants in those debates, he claims, have tended to dissolve the actual constitutional text into various nontextual discourses:

The first group, clearly, includes those, mostly liberals, who would dissolve constitutional interpretation into general moral theory. The second group, mostly conservatives, includes those who are originalists or advocates of the law-and-economics school. The third group, descended from the legal realists, include those who dissolve constitutional interpretation into the policy preferences of individual justices.