A few weeks ago, Erwin Chemerinsky, noted constitutional scholar and Dean of Law at UC Irvine, published an op ed in the San Francisco Daily Journal arguing that Senate Democrats should filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court of the United States. Dean Chemerinsky’s piece was long on hyperbole and short on … ...
Thirty years ago this month, then Attorney General Ed Meese gave a speech titled “The Law of the Constitution.” It was one of three he gave that ignited a “great debate” over legitimate and illegitimate methods of constitutional interpretation. From 1789 to the 1930s, interpreting the U.S. Constitution according to its origi ...
Supreme Court member apologizes Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg today issued an apology today on behalf of all Justices, living and dead, who ever espoused the notion of a “living constitution.” Saying that she was visited by the ghost of her late friend, Nino Scalia, she exclaimed, “it’s a stable constitution that we need, no ...
In his latest contribution to our exchange about the courts’ obligation to follow precedent, Prof. Michael Rappaport answers a question that I posed in the comments section of the Liberty Law Blog. He had argued that “the judicial power” conferred on courts by Article III of the Constitution obliges courts to follow precedent even ...
Prof. Michael Rappaport responds to my post from the other day about whether Justice Scalia’s originalism credentials are stronger than those of Justice Thomas. Rappaport says that “precedent was a widely followed practice of long-standing within the Anglo-American legal system at the time of the Constitution,” and “no Frame ...
Prof. Lee Strang has published an article in the University of Detroit Mercy Law Review arguing that Justice Antonin Scalia is more faithful to the doctrine of “original intent” than is Justice Clarence Thomas. The argument, though, seems pretty strange to me. Strang’s logic is as follows: the original intent of the framers was ...
Author: Damien M. Schiff The brouhaha over Justice Antonin Scalia's remarks in California Lawyer Magazine about the protections afforded (or not) to various minority groups under the Constitution has in large measure missed the important take-away. Here you have a Supreme Court justice articulating a version of originalism that is ...