News & Events
On April 11, we hosted the inaugural Thomas M. Cooley Judicial Lecture with Judge Joan Larsen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. We also awarded the second annual $50,000 Cooley Book Prize to Harvard Law Professor Richard M. Fallon Jr. for his book Law and Legitimacy in the Supreme Court (Harvard University Press, 2018).
On April 11, we hosted our inaugural Thomas M. Cooley Judicial Lecture with Judge Joan Larsen of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.Larsen’s lecture, “Respecting Local Control: State Law in the Federal System,” encouraged lawyers and judges to pay closer attention to state constitutional law, recounting her own experience as a justice on the Michigan Supreme Court and harkening back to Cooley’s advocacy for local control.
“State courts are too often treated in law schools and in elite legal circles as if they were the little siblings of their more sophisticated federal brethren,” she said. “But there can be no denying, even today, [that] the work of state courts matters.”
Expert criminal defense lawyer Jerome Buting talked to the Georgetown Law community in conversation with Professor Randy Barnett on Wednesday, February 27th. Buting shared some insight on new developments in Steven Avery’s case (featured in Netflix’s acclaimed series “Making a Murderer”), his path to becoming a criminal lawyer, criminal justice reform, and other topics.
The Center commemorated the 150th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Cooley’s Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union (1868) during its Fifth Annual Chase Faculty Colloquium at Georgetown Law on Saturday, December 1, 2018.
The colloquium consisted of four sessions discussing papers about substantive and interpretive issues raised by Constitutional Limitations by the following scholars:
- Joseph Postell (Colorado) on the “reasonable regulation” of liberty from the founding to the 14th Amendment
- Tara Helfman (Syracuse) on “Laissez-Faire constitutionalism”
- Greg Klass (Georgetown) on the “interpretation-construction distinction” in private law
- Larry Solum (Georgetown) on originalism and and the “interpretation-construction distinction” in public law.