Throughout its history, the Court has looked to the common law and to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England to define and understand the words used in the Constitution, so this approach to interpreting the Constitution is not new.

The common law was quite clear, per Blackstone, that “This natural life, being, as was before observed, the immediate donation of the great Creator, cannot legally be disposed of or destroyed by any individual, neither by the person himself, nor by any other of his fellow-creatures, merely upon their own authority.”

Moreover, according to Blackstone, “an infant en ventre sa mere, or in the mother’s womb, is supposed in law to be born for many purposes. It is capable of having a legacy, or a surrender of a copyhold estate made to it. It may have a guardian assigned to it; and it is enabled to have an estate limited to its use, and to take afterwards by such limitation, as if it were then actually born.”

The legislation’s insistence on the Constitution being given its original meaning and the word of the Constitution being treated as law, not judicial opinions, is why it is titled the Rule of Law Life Act.