From Professor Larry Tribe on constitutional interpretation:

All fundamental constitutional principles require an elaborate process of inference and construction far beyond anything that is simply deducible or even readily inferable from the fixed text.

Available here, at 7:25.

  In his remarks, Tribe suggests that judicial conservatives ("the Federalist Society") are also driven by a nontextual agenda. However, Tribe's evidence of this seems pretty weak. Tribe focuses mostly on the the Eleventh Amendment. While I agree that the conservatives on the Court have not taken a textual reading of the Eleventh Amendment, is Eleventh Amendment law really a big issue among judicial conservatives and the Federalist Society? I haven't thought so. My sense is that the Justices on the Rehnquist Court picked that one up (and then later mostly dropped it) on their own, without much of a movement behind it before or since.

  Of course, this doesn't mean that constitutional arguments popular on the right are all textual, or all consistent with original meaning. But Tribe's argument is that constitutional theories generally favored by the left are no less textual than constitutional theories generally favored on the right, which strikes me as a very weak claim.