On December 5th and 6th, 2019 we hosted the Sixth Annual Salmon P. Chase Distinguished Lecture & Faculty Colloquium commemorating the 200th Anniversary of McCulloch v. Maryland. The distinguished lecturer was Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas at Austin School of Law who gave a talk at the United States Supreme Court. In attendance to the lecture were members of the newest cohort of Student Fellows from the Georgetown University Law Center.
On December 6th, scholars came together to further discuss McCulloch v. Maryland in an all-day academic colloquium. The colloquium consisted of five sessions discussing papers by the following authors:
- Alison LaCroix (Chicago)
- Eric Lomazoff (Villanova)
- Farah Peterson (Virginia)
- David Schwartz (Wisconsin)
- Kevin Walsh (Richmond)
We would like to give special thanks to the Supreme Court Historical Society for co-sponsoring this event.
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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 News
May 28, 2020
Ongoing criminal justice reform efforts at the national and state level might take stock of the scholarship on the Cruel and Unusual Punishments Clause by the Center’s Resident Scholar and Professor John Stinneford (University of Florida Levin College of Law). Back in fall 2015, Professor Stinneford joined the Georgetown Center for the Constitution as a Visiting Scholar where he researched and wrote The Original Meaning of ‘Cruel’ later published in the Georgetown Law Journal in 2017 (Vol. 105). Serving as a Non-Resident Scholar of the Center, Stinneford’s influential scholarship on the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution has reached the Supreme Court and is frequently cited by judges.
March 15, 2017
Of all the labels swirling around to describe Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch before his confirmation hearings beginning March 20th, patriotic is likely among them, according to Tara Helfman, who is on loan from Syracuse Law School while she works as a Georgetown Center for the Constitution Visiting Scholar.
November 14, 2018
Might 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.
