What Is Originalism? The Evolution of Contemporary Originalist Theory

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 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...

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...

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...

St. George Tucker is commonly regarded as the most important commentator on American law in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the first...

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...

This paper, prepared for the 2023 Clifford Symposium on “New Torts” at DePaul Law School, addresses the tort of offensive battery. This is an ancient...

This paper describes the response of George Washington's administration to a plea for emergency war financing from French colonists who were trying to...

On March 1, 2024, the University of Richmond Law Review hosted a symposium entitled Vestiges of the Confederacy: Reckoning with the Legacy of the...

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...

In DeTreville v. Smalls, an 1879 case from Port Royal, South Carolina, the Supreme Court declared that titles to land that had been sold in...