Dec
05
6th Annual Salmon P. Chase Lecture
This year's Chase lecturer is Professor Sanford Levinson (Texas). The lecture will be followed by a reception co-hosted by the Supreme Court Historical Society.
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.
Featured Events
Mar
19
The Federalist Society and the Georgetown Center for the Constitution invite you to the second annual Thomas M. Cooley Judicial Lecture.
Featured News
Redefining Originalism and the Law: Professor Lee Strang Gives a Sneak Peek into His Novel Theory
May 3, 2018When he first began his academic teaching career, one of Professor Lee Strang’s (Toledo College of Law) first pieces of legal scholarship was an article on the original public meaning of the word “religion” in the Constitution. But while legal scholarship on religion has not necessarily seen an uptick, originalism definitely has, and Professor Strang’s forthcoming book: Originalism’s Promise and Limits: The Law As Coordination Account of Originalism will have something to do with that. Two years ago, Professor Strang began his term as a Visiting Scholar for the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, during which he completed the initial draft.
How Former Visiting Scholar Christina Mulligan Is Looking to the Past and the Future
May 4, 2017Most law students-turned-law professors don't normally get to experience the same law course twice, but Christina Mulligan is an exception. Professor Mulligan spent spring semester as a Visiting Scholar at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution, during which she took a trip back down memory lane.
Visiting Scholar Explores How Labeling Text in the Constitution Impacts Interpretation
November 14, 2018Might conventional naming of clauses of the Constitution—Due Process Clause, Birthright Citizenship Clause, Free Speech Clause—condition how an individual perceives what the text is designed to do? In his forthcoming book, Framing the Constitution: The Impact of Labels on Constitutional Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2020), the Center’s Visiting Scholar Donald Kochan applies interdisciplinary social science research to constitutional labels.