Many originalists and textualists disdain the consideration of consequences to determine a law’s meaning. Yet interpreters have long weighed consequences, particularly inconvenient ones, to decode the law. In the eighteenth century, the argumentum ab inconvenienti—the claim that a reading of the law was mistaken due to its adverse consequences—was a familiar technique, perhaps almost as common as an argument grounded on the letter of the law. This Article excavates the remarkably widespread invocation of consequences to defeat opposing readings and to decipher a law’s meaning. Commentators, including William Blackstone and Justice Joseph Story, discussed the practice, and legislators, executives, and judges regularly utilized it. The practice was scarcely controversial, as there seems to have been no one at the Founding who highlighted its drawbacks, much less rejected it. Instead, the likes of Chief Justice John Marshall, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison invoked consequences to fix the meaning of federal and state law. What is an epithet today—result-oriented—was almost an apt description of the practices of the era. These rather unexpected findings have moved me to reconsider—and ultimately abandon—my prior conviction that interpreters have no business considering consequences.

* James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law, Horace W. Goldsmith Research Professor of Law, and Miller Center Senior Fellow, University of Virginia. Thanks to Will Baude, Ashley Deeks, Connor Fitzpatrick, Michael Gilbert, John Harrison, Jordan Kei-Rahn, Evan Lisman, Nick Mauer, Caleb Nelson, Michael Paulsen, Michael Rappaport, Cass Sunstein, and Steve Walt for helpful conversations and comments. Thanks to Nate Bartholomew, David Bainbridge, Bradley Berklich, Anastasia Forbes, Steven Hayes, Trey Kieser, Suraj Renganathan, Lauren Rich, Kanishk Singh, and Andrew Taylor for excellent research and comments. Finally, thanks to the superb editors of the Stanford Law Review.