The intentionalist approach to constitutional interpretation, which takes the relevant aspect of the Constitution to be the framers’ or ratifiers’ intentions, flourished for a time in the second half of the 20th century (fading in the 1980s), but, in recent decades, originalists have shifted their focus to original meaning (see Whittington 2013, 379–82; Kesavan and Paulsen 2003, 1134–48). Contemporary originalism tends to focus on “original public meaning,” by which originalists mean, roughly speaking, the way in which reasonable readers of the Constitution would have understood its meaning at the time it was ratified. See section 4.2 below.