The originalism debate in contemporary American constitutional theory can be usefully understood as a three-dimensional phenomenon. The first and most immediate dimension of this debate is practical and political: The contemporary originalism debate springs from the historically specific political context of the cultural struggle over the sixties waged by liberals and conservatives in the final quarter of the twentieth century. The second dimension of the debate is theoretical and jurisprudential: The originalism debate in contemporary American constitutional theory is a particular formulation of an ongoing concern with the nature of constitutional interpretation that stems from the fact that we live under a written constitution. As long as we have a written constitution, we are going to have arguments over the nature of constitutional interpretation. Thus, while the contemporary originalism debate may have been set off by a particular political context, its roots lie in the very nature of the American constitutional system itself. An opponent of origina-lism would be wrong to dismiss it as nothing more than theoretical cover for a purely partisan, political agenda, for it is a powerful normative account of the binding capacity that we consider to be central to the very concept of a written constitution. The third dimension of the debate, however, is rather more abstract but nonetheless interesting: It is a metatheoretical argument over textuality and the nature of language, interpretation, and objectivity. The key to this metatheoretical issue is the concept of the “interpretive turn.”