It seems obvious that judges should interpret legal documents according to the plain meaning of the documents’ words as they were understood at the time they were agreed to or promulgated. This applies equally to documents arising in private law, such as wills and contracts, and public law, such as legislation or written constitutions. No one would favor a probate court reinterpreting a will to satisfy the judge’s sense of fairness rather than the testator’s particular intention expressed in writing. This layman’s understanding aligns well with that of William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England deeply informed the legal thinking of the framers of the Constitution: “Words are generally to be understood in their usual and most known signification…their general and popular use.”

It’s therefore surprising that such a commonsense canon of interpretation was largely absent from judicial chambers for much of the 20th century, at least when it came to constitutional matters. The fact that it has made a strong, albeit incomplete, comeback is a tribute to the efforts and insights of Edwin Meese III, who served as the 75th attorney general of the United States from 1985 to 1988, and was President Reagan’s friend and counselor for far longer than that.

Meese’s 1985 speech at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting is now legendary in legal circles. He announced that the Department of Justice would henceforth consider the “original intent” of the framers of the Constitution to be authoritative. Meese thereby placed himself, and the government of the United States, at odds with the preferred approach of progressive elites. Progressives had long favored a “living constitutionalism” whereby the framers’ understanding of the document’s meaning was of scant interest. Instead, they behaved as if the judiciary’s job was to keep the Constitution in sync with the spirit of the age—at least as that spirit was understood by progressive intellectuals. This turned courts into legislatures, and in effect gave the Supreme Court the ability to amend the Constitution outside of its formal but cumbersome amendment procedure.

Meese’s speech did not consist of the banalities that lawyers had come to expect from attorneys general. Instead, he boldly laid into the Supreme Court, which he claimed had gone far off the rails. He said it had illegitimately expanded national powers at the expense of the states, and for decades had shown constitutionally unwarranted hostility to religious liberty. These grave errors came about, according to Meese, because the Court paid no attention to constitutional originalism.

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In The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment, law professors Steven Calabresi of Northwestern University and Gary Lawson of the University of Florida document Meese’s extraordinary contributions to the making of this “constitutional moment.” Meese and the originalist movement soon refined their jurisprudence of “original intent” to one of “original public meaning,” which is a more judicially cognizable enterprise. Instead of searching for subjective intent to define the meaning of constitutional text, the authors write, “the intentions of particular actors [serve] as evidence of that meaning but not the meaning itself.” “Originalism,” they continue, “is the standard way to ascertain the meaning of any document or communication. It is how one understands ordinary conversation.”

American constitutional jurisprudence has been living in the shadow of the “Meese Revolution” ever since. Though not reliably pleasing to conservatives, originalism has proved to be far more threatening to progressives. Liberals no longer see the Supreme Court as a trusty ally, giving them what they could not possibly achieve at the ballot box. The fiery debates and smear campaigns that now regularly accompany Supreme Court nominations are only the most public manifestations of the stakes of originalism.

Meese had a much more comprehensive theory of the role of judges and of legal interpretation than even his most illustrious predecessors in the office of attorney general, including those who would later serve on the Supreme Court, such as Roger Taney or Robert Jackson. The authors plausibly claim that “[e]very development over the last four decades that has led to the modern successes of originalism can be traced to Ed Meese. Never before or since in American history has any one attorney general so thoroughly transformed the legal culture.”

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Of course, Meese did not act alone in effecting this transformation. He surrounded himself with an able group of speechwriters, legal thinkers, and political consiglieres. His chief speechwriter was Terry Eastland, who would go on to a long career as a journalist, editor, and publisher. Working with him were Gary McDowell, who became one of America’s preeminent constitutional scholars, and Blair Dorminey. McDowell and Dorminey were tasked with making Meese’s bar association address both a commentary on the Supreme Court and a brief for originalism. They succeeded on both counts. And the authors, too, played their parts: Calabresi worked closely with Ken Cribb, Meese’s confidant and chief of staff, and Lawson served as a staff attorney in the Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department’s legal advisory division for the executive branch. As the book amply documents, the Meese revolution was a team effort.

This team, Calabresi and Lawson write, ensured the Justice Department acted as “a giant law school that would teach the courts and the bar ‘originalism.’” It viewed its client not as “Congress, the president, or the particular agency whose action was at issue in any particular case,” but the Constitution itself. The authors emphasize the enormousness of this intellectual shift:

Someone in 1983 looking for a theoretically sophisticated explication or defense of originalism in a pre-Ed Meese world would find nothing. Literally nothing. The academic works taken to define the idea of originalism looked to and catalogued specific intentions of historically concrete actors, without serious investigations of the nature of interpretation or possible alternative accounts of original meaning.

What passed for constitutional law in the mid-20th century was not really constitutional law at all, but a series of policy decisions most often pleasing to political liberals. Meese had the temerity to say that Supreme Court decisions could be wrong and that the Constitution is not synonymous with the Court’s opinions. This should hardly be controversial, yet it set off a firestorm in liberal legal and journalistic circles.

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The fruits of Meese’s labors are readily visible to those who follow American legal history. Currently, six of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are influenced to a substantial degree by the originalist movement. They have delivered major originalist victories—or at the very least, they have overturned clearly non-originalist precedents in areas as diverse as affirmative action and abortion. As the authors show, originalism is not synonymous with “judicial restraint,” which was a notion favored by earlier conservative critics of judicial hubris. One species of judicial restraint, for instance, is undue deference to precedent—even when precedent is at odds with the Constitution.

Meese’s influence is a credit to his first-rate intellect, but it didn’t hurt that he was a friend and long-time advisor of the president. Calabresi and Lawson recount the important roles Meese played in virtually every aspect of the Reagan Revolution. As counselor to the president in the first Reagan Administration, Meese’s fingerprints were everywhere.

But despite his ties to the president, Meese was never a swamp creature. “He did not care about money, personal power, fame, sex, or getting good press,” the authors write. “There was no way Washington insiders could corrupt him.” These qualities served him well during Reagan’s second term, when Meese was attorney general and chairman of the Domestic Policy Council. With the aid of his team of young and formidable lawyers, Meese made the framers’ Constitution a central concern of the Department of Justice and the White House. A reinvigorated sense of federalism, including firm constitutional limitations on national power, animated much of their work. They also concentrated on a diverse array of other matters: they worked on judicial selection at all levels of the federal court system, wrote originalist scholarship, offered originalist legal guidance to the executive branch, and even tried to nudge reluctant Solicitor General Charles Fried in an originalist direction.

Even as this political and intellectual heavy lifting was going on, Meese managed to be a key figure in many important personnel choices, both political and judicial. He secured the appointment of Howard Baker as Reagan’s third chief of staff, to calm the storm over the Iran-Contra scandal. His voice was critical in persuading Reagan to nominate Antonin Scalia and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, thus laying the groundwork for what was to follow. Meese ensured that constitutional originalism would not be a mere academic pastime.

Calabresi and Lawson provide a detailed and important account of Meese’s central role in one of the most important and enduring constitutional moments in American history. Though they deny that they’ve written a biography, they recount many of Meese’s considerable accomplishments outside the realm of constitutional jurisprudence. They also provide a warm tribute to Meese the man, whose humility and devoted service to his country are well known to his friends. The authors are right to think these things should be documented for posterity.

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But The Meese Revolution is marred by problems of execution. The authors are lawyers, not writers, and it shows. Awkward transitions and clunky sentences abound. “All right, one bit of commentary” follows a quote from Ronald Reagan. “For the reasons given in this book, we go with Meese, but everyone can make up their own minds about that” follows a list of the most influential attorneys general.

Furthermore, the authors’ choice to deal with several overlapping strands of Meese’s life—constitutional originalist, political operative, and man—leads them occasionally to appear unsure what the book is about, or the order in which to place their recounting of the historical record. They are also prone to repetition, as they seem to lose track of the ground they’ve covered.

The book also leads the reader down paths that would best be left untraveled in a work of this sort. For example, it contains high-level surveys of Reagan’s views on the federal government, free markets, and foreign policy, and even brief introductions to various players in the Reagan Revolution, from George H.W. Bush to Margaret Thatcher. These topics are likely to be familiar to readers of a book about Meese, and the authors provide no fresh insights into any of them. Meanwhile, matters that do seem central to their story, such as Meese’s involvement in judicial selection before he became attorney general, get lost in the digressions. The reader is also frog-marched through an unseemly amount of inside baseball as the authors recount the various players, major and minor, with whom they interacted as they enjoyed front-row seats at the Meese revolution. There are too many times when Meese himself recedes to the background of their narrative.

Despite these distractions, the book serves as a salutary reminder that “[t]he originalism genie, which Ed Meese let out of the bottle, can never be put back in…. It is now a permanent part of American legal history.” Meese did this as only he could, always remaining a gentleman, a scholar, and a humble public servant to whom America owes an enormous debt of gratitude.