The Case for New Textualism

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...

We live in a golden age of student surveillance. Some surveillance is old school: video cameras, school resource officers, and tip lines. Old-school...

This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced that the key to applying originalist methodology...

How should judges decide hard cases involving rights conflicts? Standard debates about this question are usually framed in jurisprudential terms...

This article argues that the fact that an action will compound a prior injustice counts as a reason against doing the action. I call this reason The...

At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...

There is one group that the court does not put into an identity straitjacket—those claiming religious exemptions.

This special issue of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities contains papers presented at a March 2022 conference at Yale Law School marking the...

Originalism is becoming the coin of the realm at the conservative Supreme Court. Even newly appointed liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has drawn...

Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we have found that a majority of Americans, more than 60 percent, consider false...

Given that no two acts, events, situations, and legal cases are identical, precedential constraint necessarily involves determining which two...

This chapter examines the intellectual and social contexts in which the American Law Institute (ALI) has operated and how they have influenced the...

Federal courts control an outsize share of big-ticket corporate litigation. And that control rests, to a significant degree, on the Supreme Court’s...

Sometimes a police officer can only stop a fleeing suspect by striking or shooting him. When is it morally justified to use such force rather than let...

A division exists between scholars who claim that Congress made only limited delegations to executive officials in the early Republic, and those who...

Philosophers have debated whether the advance directives of Alzheimer’s patients should be enforced, even if patients seem content in their demented...

This short essay considers Benjamin Zipursky’s intriguing effort to identify a tradition of “American natural law theory” that links Benjamin Cardozo...