Perhaps the biggest reason Republicans love Neil Gorsuch’s selection as President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee — apart from his age — is the fact that he’s a demonstrated originalist.

Among conservatives, that’s basically code for “not an activist judge.” And among liberals, it’s basically code for “conservative.”

…

In a 2011 paper, Georgetown University law professor Lawrence B. Solum writes that the first published instance of the term “originalism” in legal periodicals was in the early 1980s. The author, former Stanford law school dean Paul Brest, said he coined the term:

Brest used the terms “originalism” and “originalist” in order to refer to a position that he was criticizing. Brest’s term caught on, and eventually was adopted by proponents of the views that had affinities with the object of his critique. As a consequence, the words “originalism” and “originalist” are ambiguous – used by scholars, lawyers, judges, and the public in a variety of different ways. It seems likely that as a matter of lexicography, “originalism” is a family resemblance term – with several overlapping senses.