The Troubling Apotheosis of the Notorious RBG
The adulation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, which appears ever growing on the left, raises concerns about the left’s model of a justice and of justice. Ginsburg is the jurist currently on the Court who has...
View ArticleTextualism and the Virtues of Honest Reading
Richard A. Epstein’s recent comments on textualism, while sympathetic, nonetheless advance several straw man arguments against the view. I am willing to concede they are straw man arguments invited...
View ArticleConstitutional Interpretation and the Impeachment Power
Last week, I began what I expect to be a series of posts on the constitutional power of impeachment. What is the proper understanding of the Constitution’s standard for impeachment of federal...
View ArticleTesting Textualism by Reading Biblical Law
While reflecting on a reading from Leviticus regarding the gleaning laws, Stephen Gottlieb, a professor at Albany Law School, couldn’t help but consider that if the textualists on the Supreme Court...
View ArticleJustice Kagan Recognizes Legal Meaning as the Proper Object of Interpretation
I was asked recently if being an originalist in constitutional interpretation required you to be a texualist in statutory interpretation. The answer is no, at least if the textualism at issue is that...
View ArticleConstitutional Text and State Sovereign Immunity
One of the most difficult issues for the originalists on the Supreme Court has been state sovereign immunity. While these originalists usually argue against interpretations that do not derive from the...
View ArticleIndependent Agencies Brought to Heel?
Independent agencies—agencies whose heads cannot be fired by the President at will—raise profound questions of constitutional structure and political accountability. The Constitution vests the...
View ArticleThe Mindlessness of Bostock
In Bostock v. Clayton County, as everyone by now knows, the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating based on sexual orientation or...
View ArticleRemembering Justice Scalia
This week, Crown Forum released The Essential Scalia: On the Constitution, the Courts, and the Rule of Law. Edited by Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton and Edward Whelan, and with a foreword by Justice Elena...
View ArticlePride Before the Fall at the FTC?
Last month Lina Khan, the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, issued an internal memo setting out her goals for the agency. It is a paper loaded with bureaucratic abstraction. Khan calls on the...
View Article
