The passage suggests that a historian conducting a strictly historical inquiry would make which of the following assumptions when studying the Bill of Rights?

The importance of the Bill of Rights in twentieth-century United States law and politics has led some historians to search for the "original meaning" of its most controversial clauses. This approach. known as "originalism." presumes that each right codified in the Bill of Rights had au independent history that can be studied in isolation from the histories of other rights, and its proponents ask how formulations of the Bill of Rights in 1791 reflected developments in specific areas of legal thinking at that time. Legal and constitutional historians, for example, have found originalism especially useful in the study of provisions of the Bill of Rights that were innovative by eighteenth-century standards, such as the Fourth Amendment’s broadly termed protection against "unreasonable searches and seizures." Recent calls in the legal and political arena for a return to a "jurisprudence of original intention." however, have made it a matter of much more than purely scholarly interest when originalists insist that a clause’s true meaning was fixed at the moment of its adoption, or maintain that only those rights explicitly mentioned in the United States Constitution deserve constitutional recognition and protection. These two claims seemingly lend support to the notion that an interpreter must apply fixed definitions of a fixed number of rights to contemporary issues, for the claims imply that the central problem of rights in the Revolutionary era was to precisely identity, enumerate, and define those rights that Americans felt were crucial to protecting their liberty.

Both claims, however, are questionable from the perspective of a strictly historical inquiry, however sensible they may seem from the vantage point of contemporary jurisprudence. Even though originalists are correct in claiming that the search for original meaning is inherently historical, historians would not normally seek.

The passage suggests that a historian conducting a strictly historical inquiry would make which of the following assumptions when studying the Bill of Rights?
A . The framers of the Bill of Rights sought to define each right in strict and narrow terms.
B . The results of historical inquiry into the true meaning of its clauses must be applied to contemporary issues.
C . Developments in thinking about individual rights ended after the codification of those rights.
D . It is possible to determine why a particular clause was included in the Bill of Rights.
E . Legistators of the Revolutionary era were preoccupied with defining and enumerating those rights that were crucial to individual liberty.

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Answer: D