Imagine if the US Code suddenly became fixed and holy. Now imagine you are thousands of years in the future. Congress is long gone and if you're lucky you might have some notes and stories about how the laws were enforced in the past.
Naturally, the world has changed a lot since the text of the law became immutable. But who is to say how new things fit into the old framework? What about old contradictions that were never addressed? What about laws on the books that were never enforced in practice, do those still count? And so on.
In our hypothetical scenario there is no Supreme Court, but there would probably be dozens of 'pretenders to the throne' who believe they have the right to interpret the law correctly. So you as an individual can choose which school of thought you want to subscribe to. Letter of the law? Spirit of the Law?
And in a funny way, when we ask ourselves "what did the Founding Fathers want?" we are doing the same thing as theologians when they wonder what God wanted.
To extend this analogy further, in Judaism, we ascribe more value to the opinions of rabbis "closer to the source". So we would look at the tax code from 1000 years ago and try to interpret that. But we might also say, "John Marshall was a great justice and one of his opinions dealt with something similar, how can we apply that to our situation here?"
Naturally, the world has changed a lot since the text of the law became immutable. But who is to say how new things fit into the old framework? What about old contradictions that were never addressed? What about laws on the books that were never enforced in practice, do those still count? And so on.
In our hypothetical scenario there is no Supreme Court, but there would probably be dozens of 'pretenders to the throne' who believe they have the right to interpret the law correctly. So you as an individual can choose which school of thought you want to subscribe to. Letter of the law? Spirit of the Law?
And in a funny way, when we ask ourselves "what did the Founding Fathers want?" we are doing the same thing as theologians when they wonder what God wanted.