On the other hand, as noted, prominent new originalists insist that the term “constitutional interpretation” should be used for identifying the meaning of the constitutional text. As they officially draw the interpretation/construction distinction, however, it contains no stage at which a court ascertains the content of the law; when a court is not interpreting, it is engaged in constitutional construction, which is supposed to be a creative and political process of constructing meaning (Barnett 2013, 619; 1999, 645–46; Whittington 1999a, 7). See section 3. A charitable reading of the new originalists might therefore take them to assume that a provision’s contribution is constituted by the meaning of the text or simply to equate a provision’s contribution with “the meaning of the text.” In that case, the new originalists may be understood, despite their rhetoric, as taking legal interpretation to seek a provision’s contribution.[12] (In addition, as we will see in section 4.2, what the new originalists’ take to be the meaning of the text – “public meaning” – is probably best understood as not a kind of linguistic meaning at all.)