This statement addresses the nature of originalism. Originalism consists of three core ideas: (1) the original meaning of the constitutional text is its public meaning; (2) the original meaning of the text is fixed at the time the text was framed and ratified; and, (3) judges should be bound by the original meaning of the text. Much of the public discussion of originalism has focused on myths: originalism does not attempt to answer the question, "What would Madison do?," and many other charges against originalism are mythical as well. Originalism is in the mainstream of American jurisprudence historically, and originalism should be acceptable to Americans from a broad range of political orientations. The two core arguments for originalism focus on the rule of law and legitimacy.
Virtue jurisprudence is an approach to normative legal theory that answers normative questions about law from a perspective that is centred on the...
The United States is undergoing a legal realignment, in that salient legal views recently associated with the right are now being espoused by the left...
This essay considers the future of public-private collaboration in the wake of the Murthy v. Missouri litigation, which cast doubt on the...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
Almost half of the states in the country have made it harder to get an abortion since the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the federal right to get an...
The idea of institutionalism figures prominently in today’s debates about the role of federal courts in American democracy. For example, Chief Justice...
History and precedent tell us that the just compensation requirement has been implemented by a complex network of remedies providing multiple avenues...
A large segment of the political left identifies as “progressive,” but what does a belief in progress entail? This short essay, written for a...
It has been a big moment for court reform. President Biden has proposed a slate of important if vaguely defined reforms, including a new ethics regime...
After a term in which the conservative Roberts court swept aside the Chevron doctrine, a decision that will clip federal agencies’ authority to enact...
In Cantero v. Bank of America, the US Supreme Court declined to decide whether Bank of America Corp. must pay interest on New York mortgage borrowers’...
The Environmental Law and Community Engagement Clinic at the University of Virginia School of Law filed this amicus brief on behalf of San Bernardino...
The Supreme Court has overruled Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, finally interring a doctrine of statutory interpretation that it had...
On June 27, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a case brought by the federal government regarding whether Idaho’s abortion ban conflicts with a...
Twenty-first-century politics has inspired a new mode of interstate rivalries and reprisals consisting not of the tariffs that plagued the Founding...
Our perceptions of what we owe each other turn somewhat on whether we consider “another” to be “an other”—a stranger and not a friend. In this essay...
On Thursday afternoon, in an important lawsuit seeking to clarify which religious objectors will be taken seriously when they seek legal exemptions, a...
We apply a dynamic influence model to the opinions of the U.S. federal courts to examine the role of the U.S. Supreme Court in influencing the...