Originalism, Hermeneutics, and the Fixation Thesis

A distinct set of six institutions and traditions makes the country hard to subjugate to an authoritarian’s will.

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...

In theoretical linguistics the word “pragmatics” refers to the roles of context and communicative intentions in the production of meaning. Those roles...

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

A large segment of the political left identifies as “progressive,” but what does a belief in progress entail? This short essay, written for a...

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court acknowledged the difficulties in applying its constitutional originalism to the...

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...

Constitutional theory is a mess. Disagreements about originalism and living constitutionalism have become intractable. Constitutional theorists make...

Moore v. United States raises the question whether unrealized gains, such as an increase in property value or a stock portfolio, constitute “incomes...

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...

“Dignity” is a rallying cry of social and political movements worldwide. It also appears in legal doctrine and scholarship. But the meaning of dignity...

Although ethical critiques of markets are longstanding, modern academic debates about the “moral limits of markets” (MLM) tend to be fairly limited in...

Many analyses of law take an unsentimental, perhaps even cynical view of regulated actors. On this view, law is a necessity borne of people’s selfish...

At points in American history, there have been significant, even massive shifts in constitutional understandings, doctrines, and practices. Apparently...

The Supreme Court has explicitly linked the concept of stare decisis to the protection of judicial legitimacy. In Dobbs, Justice Alito's opinion set...