Group items tagged

WIKIPEDIA, KEN HAMMOND (USDA)In 2008, Judy van de Water from the University of California, Davis, discovered a group of autoantibodies—those that trigger immune responses against the body’s own molecules—that are especially common in mothers of children with autism.

“Given that, at present, only between 15 and 20 percent of children with autism have known causes—mainly genetic and infectious mechanisms—this will be a major advance.”

“It would allow mothers to plan,” said van de Water, by enrolling their children in educational programs that promote social skills from an early age.

“The written Constitution cannot work as intended without something outside of it — America’s unwritten Constitution — to fill its gaps and stabilize its meaning.” The meaning of the “inside” — the text’s literal words—cannot be specified independently of the “outside” — the set of assumptions and values that hangs over the enterprise and gives the deeds and words that occur within it shape and point. The text may not enumerate those assumptions and values, but, explains Amar, they “go without saying,” and because they go without saying the words that are said receive their meaning from them. “The unwritten Constitution … helps make sense of the text,” a sense that would not be available if an interpreter were confined to a “clause-bound literalism.”

Explicitness, it turns out, is not a possible human achievement, which is no big deal because communication and understanding do not require it.What they do require is a grasp of the enterprise within which a particular utterance or writing is encountered.

The unwritten principles that preside over constitutional interpretation should not be thought of as items in a list; they are, rather, part and parcel of a general project — the implementation of American-style democracy — that is not defined and limited by the implications and considerations it gives rise to.