A major contribution to our understanding of the “Second Founding” that remade the United States after the Civil War, The Original Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment: Its Letter and Spirit advances the bold claim that fidelity to the Constitution requires nothing less than a radical shift in how we comprehend Sections 1 and 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment. The problem is not, authors Randy E. Barnett and Evan D. Bernick explain, that the current approach to the Fourteenth Amendment has led to disaster, for by their own account the United States in 2021 is a cynosure (albeit an imperfect one) of freedom and opportunity. Rather, what drove the authors to write this book is their conviction that, as they put it, most of what now “comprises the conventional wisdom about the meaning of the most salient clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong.” What is more, to persist in these errors is to risk undermining the legitimacy—both moral and sociological—of our constitutional order.
Today, legal culture is shaped by One Big Question: should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power? This question is affecting...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced that the key to applying originalist methodology...
Originalism is becoming the coin of the realm at the conservative Supreme Court. Even newly appointed liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has drawn...
A division exists between scholars who claim that Congress made only limited delegations to executive officials in the early Republic, and those who...
Just as the Supreme Court is poised to achieve many of the stated aims of the conservative legal movement, including overturning Roe v. Wade and...
The modern law of personal jurisdiction in the United States is largely the product of living constitutionalism. The most important decision is Intern...
A major contribution to our understanding of the “Second Founding” that remade the United States after the Civil War, The Original Meaning of the...
Formalism is one of the most widely applied but misunderstood features of law. Embroiled in a series of conflicts over the course of the twentieth...
This Essay responds to Professors William Baude and Stephen Sachs’s recent article, Grounding Originalism, in which they offer replies to various...
This Essay explores the conceptual structure of the great debate about “originalism” and “living constitutionalism.” The core of the great debate is...
This substantially revised version of "The Constraint Principle" addresses the central normative claim of constitutional originalism: the original...
Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution vests the regulation of congressional elections in “each State by the Legislature thereof.” In Arizona...
This title of this post, which addresses the legality of Michelle Lee’s recent appointment within the PTO, needs a bit of explanation. The first two...