 The American Constitution is brief, but it has many important provisions, equal protection of the law, protection of fundamental rights, free speech, free expression, free press, right against unreasonable search and seizure, right to a lawyer, right to fair criminal process. There are many in there, so it preserves democratic institutions, it preserves basic human rights, it divides power among three branches of government, legislature, congress, executive, the president, and the judicial, the court, supreme court and lower courts, it does that so no one will get too much power. The indifference when you're interpreting a text, whether it's a statute or the constitution, is a question of emphasis. All judges, I believe you'll find your judges in Holland or in France or in England, they all think about the same thing in the sense that they all think that there are six important tools that they use to interpret a text. Is that, what does it say? That's the first thing you look at, what does it say? If it says something about vegetables, that doesn't include rabbits, alright? So you're limited by text, but if it's a case in this court, it's very unlikely that the text is clear, otherwise why have judges come to different conclusions? So there's the text, there is the history, everyone thinks the history is relevant. I think the history is relevant, and you look at it, what is the history of this provision or this statute? Of course you look at that, tradition, habeas corpus is a word with some real tradition in American and English law and elsewhere, of course you look at the traditions, precedent, what did judges say in the past? We all try to follow precedent, but if precedent, history and tradition and text were clear enough, why do we have the case? I think also everyone will agree that we looked at the purpose, what is the purpose of this provision? Why? Did someone write it? They had a reason and consequences. If you decide this way, how in fact will you further the purpose or reckon? If you decide that way, what consequences will flow and how will they affect the purpose of this statute? So everyone looks to those six things, history, text, precedent, tradition, purposes or values and consequences. Some emphasize the first more, the history, the text, they emphasize it more. I think it's easier to rely on or define. Others like me emphasize the latter two, purpose, value, consequence, those more, but it's a question of degree. Justice Scalia thought he hardly ever looked to purposes. I used to discuss this, and indeed publicly, I'd say but here are some cases where you did, he said I don't mean completely. Of course not. In a famous case, which I was in dissent in, saying that the Second Amendment protected a right to maintain a gun and a home, he thought that the origin of the founders of the Constitution wrote the Second Amendment, which said you have a right to bear arms, to protect that kind of thing. My side of it. The dissenters read the same history and we came to the opposite conclusion. We thought they were interested in protecting the rights of states to maintain militias. And so history doesn't, in my opinion, very often give us the answer. It does sometimes, but everybody will look at it in appropriate cases. So when you read the media, while you're reading people who are mostly politics, and what they're doing is they like to emphasize their differences. But really there is much more similarity than people think.