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GRE Exam
The importance of the Bill of Rights in twentieth-century United States law and politics has led some historians to search for the "original meaning" of its most controversial clauses. This approach. known as "originalism." presumes that each right codified in the Bill of Rights had au independent history that can be studied in isolation from the histories of other rights, and its proponents ask how formulations of the Bill of Rights in 1791 reflected developments in specific areas of legal thinking at that time. Legal and constitutional historians, for example, have found originalism especially useful in the study of provisions of the Bill of Rights that were innovative by eighteenth-century standards, such as the Fourth Amendment's broadly termed protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Recent calls in the legal and political arena for a return to a "jurisprudence of original intention." however, have made it a matter of much more than purely scholarly interest when originalists insist that a clause's true meaning was fixed at the moment of its adoption, or maintain that only those rights explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution deserve constitutional recognition and protection. These two claims seemingly lend support to the notion that an interpreter must apply fixed definitions of a fixed number of rights to contemporary issues, for the claims imply that the central problem of rights in the Revolutionary era was to precisely identity, enumerate, and define those rights that Americans felt were crucial to protecting their liberty.
Both claims, however, are questionable from the perspective of a strictly historical inquiry, however sensible they may seem from the vantage point of contemporary jurisprudence. Even though originalists are correct in claiming that the search for original meaning is inherently historical, historians would not normally seek.
It can be inferred that the author of the passage would be most likely to agree with which of the following statements about the Bill of Rights?
The following appeared as a letter to the editor from the owner of a skate shop in Central Plaza.
"Two years ago the city council voted to prohibit skateboarding in Central Plaza. They claimed that skateboard users were responsible for litter and vandalism that were keeping other visitors from coming to the plaza. In the past two years, however, there has been only a small increase in the number of visitors to Central Plaza. and litter and vandalism are still problematic. Skateboarding is permitted in Monroe Park, however, and there is no problem with litter or vandalism there. In order to restore Central Plaza to its former glory, then, we recommend that the city lift its prohibition on skateboarding in the plaza."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
There are far too many (i)________in the report, such as incorrect data (albeit on (ii)________points).
inconsistency between the text and related tables, and discrepancies between the citations and the references.