A survey of the voluminous literature on the originalism debate in contemporary American constitutional theory suggests that the arguments for the originalist paradigm of constitutional interpretation tend to fall into two general categories: literary and political. The literary argument advanced by originalists is, simply, that reading a text obviously involves nothing more and nothing less than attempting to discover what the author was trying to communicate. Originalists themselves differ as to evidence of the original understanding of the Constitution. For some, original understanding is grounded in the intentions of the Framers – the authors – of the Constitution, the position I call hard originalism; for others, original understanding is grounded in the understanding of the ratifiers – the first readers – of the Constitution, the position I call soft originalism. Raoul Berger writes:

On this view, which is that of hard originalism, the author of a text controls the meaning, and the reader's task can be nothing other than to enter into the mind of the author.