GRE Exam Dumps : GRE General Test

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 poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was the premier Black writer of poetry that used the dialect of rural African Americans of the southern United States. Although Dunbar's works were both popular with readers am! acclaimed by literary critics during his lifetime, after the First World War a radical shift occurred, at least in critical opinion of his poetry, and twentieth-century critical evaluation of his work has been generally negative. Some critics attacked his work on social grounds for failing to challenge plantation stereotypes of African Americans. Other critics, such as the poet James Weldon Johnson, argued from aesthetic grounds that dialect poetry in general was too limited as an artistic medium, and capable of producing only two effects: pathos and humor. The negative critical trend only began to reverse itself in the 1970s, when scholars began to emphasize the importance of mythic, psyclwlogical. and historical dimensions of Dunbar's works, focusing on the interior and exterior realities of African American life after the Civil War.

Which of the following can be inferred from the passage concerning Litrary critics’ evaluations of Dunbar's poetry?