Liberal law professors have joined in the redefining of words. One has given a numerical meaning to "judicial activism" by counting how many laws particular Justices have declared unconstitutional. As Mark Twain said, there are three kinds of lies -- lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Another law professor, Stanley Fish of Florida International University, likewise befogs the obvious with elegant nonsense.
Those who try to follow the "original intent" of the Constitution cannot do so, according to Professor Fish, because "the author's intent" cannot be discerned, "so the intention behind a text can always be challenged by someone else who marshals different evidence for an alternative intention."
Clever, but no cigar.
While the phrase "original intent" has been used as a loose label for the philosophy of judges who believe in sticking to the law as it is written, judges with this philosophy have been very explicit, for more than a century, that they did not -- repeat, not -- mean getting inside the heads of those who wrote the constitution.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said it in plain English, that interpreting what was meant by someone who wrote a law was not trying to "get into his mind" because the issue was "not what this man meant, but what those words would mean in the mouth of a normal speaker of English, using them in the circumstances in which they were used."
Such contemporary followers of Holmes as Judge Robert Bork have said the same thing in different words. More important, nobody ever voted on what was in the back of someone else's mind. They voted on the plain meaning of obvious words.
There is no confusion between the government's taking land for its own use and seizing land to turn it over to somebody else. The only confusion is the calculated confusion of the partisans of judicial activists.