Federalist Paper No. 78, Alexander Hamilton explicitly said that the Courts must
interpret the laws. mchidtag the Constitution.

But Hamilton says this power to interpret and to overturn laws does not make the
Supreme Court superior to the other branches of government. He says the courts
actually are enforcing the limitations that the people themselves had put on
government when they ratified the Constitution.

Many important constitutional provisions are written in very broad language. How
ought judges to interpret them? One possibility is to assess the "Original Intent" of
the Constitution. This theory, sometimes called "originalism," says the court should
think of the Constitution as a contract in which the people agreed to place limits on
their government. In contractual disputes, judges regularly determine what the
parties to the contract intended it to mean when they wrote it, and they interpret the
words accordingly.

The doctrine of "original intent" therefore urges the court to figure out what the
Framers of the Constitution meant, and to apply those original meanings to current
disputes. For example, in judging whether capital punishment is constitutional,
judges would ask whether the framers of the Constitution believed that executions