Kellen Funk, Columbia University Law School, is publishing Sect and Superstition: The Protestant Framework of American Codification in the American Journal of Legal History (2024). Here is the abstract.
Elite lawyers who debated codification in the nineteenth-century United States treated codification as inseparable from a liberal Protestant textualism that had taken hold in the early…
A terse headline at Reuters. Syria’s army command notified officers on Sunday that Assad’s rule had ended…. Assad, who has not spoken in public since the sudden rebel advance a week ago, flew out of Damascus for an unknown destination earlier on Sunday, two senior army officers told Reuters, as rebels said they had entered…
An idea thrown out by Barack Obama, speaking on “the power of pluralism,” at the Democracy Forum in Chicago last Thursday:[M]ega churches understand that belonging precedes belief. If you show up at one of these churches, they don’t start off peppering you with questions about whether you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.…
That’s the writing of a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Alice Munro, and that’s not a flawed fictional character observed by a wise writer. That’s Alice Munro expressing her own feelings in a letter, quoted in “What Alice Munro Knew/The Nobel-winning author’s husband was a pedophile who targeted her daughter and other children.
William Aceves, California Western School of Law, is publishing Critical Constitutional Law and the Alito Palimpsest in volume 27 of the University of Pennsylvana Journal of Constitutional Law (2025). Here is the abstract.
This article uses an innovative metaphor—the palimpsest—and a provocative philosophical tradition—genealogy—to generate a new theory of critical constitutional law. It is a…
Lyle Cherneff, a 2024 Yale Law graduate, has published Remembering In re Turner: Popular Constitutionalism in the Reconstruction Era, in the Yale Law Journal:This Note presents a historical account of the underexamined movement to end racialized apprenticeship laws in the post-slavery era. Original archival research from census records, Union Army files,…
[We have the following announcement. DRE.]The Honors Committee of the American Society for Legal History solicits nominations of senior scholars for consideration for election as Honorary Fellows of the Society. Election as Honorary Fellow is the highest honor the Society can confer. It recognizes distinguished historians whose scholarship has shaped the broad discipline of…
Joshua Braver, University of Wisconsin Law School, and Gregory Elinson, Northern Illinois University College of Law, are publishing A Progressive Judiciary? Judicial Review and National Politics from Reconstruction to the Present in the Uniersity of Arizona Law Review. Here is the abstract.
Within legal academia, the conventional historical narrative is that the Supreme Court has…
Dr. Keanu Sai was invited to do a podcast interview by Professor Pascal Lottaz on the subject of the American occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a Neutral State. Professor Lottaz is an Assistant Professor for Neutrality Studies at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Tokyo. He is a also a researcher at Neutrality Studies…
Lawrence B. Solum, University of Virginia School of Law, is publishing Original Public Meaning in volume 2023 of the Michigan State Law Review. Here is the abstract.
“Original public meaning” has become increasingly important in constitutional discourse. This Article investigates the nature of original public meaning in three steps. First, each word in the phrase…
