But perhaps things are not quite this simple. Suppose we agreed that the goal of the Eighth Amendment’s authors was to ban cruel and unusual punishments, and that they, along with virtually every other American of the day, believed that hanging did not fall within the extension of that phrase. In other words, what we might call their concrete understanding of the abstract notion ‘cruel and unusual punishment’, was such as to permit the use of hanging. If so, and if a contemporary interpreter bel