While doing research at Georgetown, Professor Mulligan sat in on Constitutional Law I by Professor Randy Barnett. “It was a particularly interesting experience because I actually took the same course from him over ten years ago when I was a first-year law student,” Mulligan says. “Experiencing how the course has changed has helped me reflect on how constitutional law has evolved in the past decade.”

For the past few months, Professor Mulligan participated in seminars and conferences hosted by the Center, in addition to courses taught by the Center’s scholars. She also joined Professor Solum’s constitutional law colloquium, where Georgetown Law students offered critiques about her work. “I presented a draft of a new paper, Diverse Originalism, to Larry Solum’s colloquium, and that has been hugely helpful to orienting that project,” Mulligan says. “Such great comments and feedback from the students and attendees!”

Mulligan, who studied philosophy and mathematics and almost pursued a graduate degree in philosophy, ultimately decided to attend law school to “engage with more practical problems.” Although Mulligan initially became a professor to study and teach intellectual property and technology law, she began serious constitutional law scholarship through a series of events. Her scholarship in both areas offers insights into current debates about originalism and telecommunications.

While writing an earlier paper, Founding Era Translations of the US Constitution, Mulligan says she became interested in studying “unusual sources” to better understand the Constitution. “I realized I wanted to get more involved in discussions about constitutional interpretation,” Mulligan says. “Being a visiting scholar has [allowed me] to drink from the firehose of constitutional law scholarship —I have learned so much this semester.”

Now back at Brooklyn Law, Professor Mulligan will resume her current projects in both constitutional law and technology law. During the past several years, she’s written about the impact of software licensing on our legal relationship to intellectual property as well as the omnipresent objects in our daily lives that are becoming “smart” and Internet-connected. Mulligan says that on the technology law front, black-box algorithms are “going to be very disruptive —how do we understand “who” caused something to happen when programmers write algorithms so complex that the programmer can’t explain why the computer acted as it did?”

Regardless of how far forward into the future she goes, she also remains interested in learning from the past. “I’m also looking at unexpected sources of constitutional interpretation from the founding era —speakers who weren’t in the public eye or who have flown under the radar.” And Professor Mulligan says she has no plans to stop exploring the vast timeline of law and modernism. “I think I’m destined to continue looking at the past and the future!” Mulligan says. “I expect to keep a foot in both the founding era and future for quite some time.”

Professor’s Mulligan’s story on what brought her to study foreign language translations of the Constitution:

“Back in about 2011, a friend of mine told me that he’d heard that the Constitution had been translated into German in 1787, and wouldn’t it be fascinating to see how the different terms were translated? I searched a bit on the Internet but could hardly find anything about them —Pauline Maier mentioned German translations existed in her 2010 book Ratification, but actual copies of the translated text didn’t immediately pop up online. At the time, I was primarily writing about copyright law and software patents while doing a fellowship at Yale, but for about a year if I ran into a historian or librarian, I would basically accost them and ask, “Have you ever heard of these translations? Do you know where they might be?” Eventually I thought to ask Michael Widener, the rare book librarian at Yale Law School, and he managed to find a copy of not just the German translation that had been commissioned by the Pennsylvania legislature, but also a Dutch translation commissioned by the Federal Committee of New York. The oddest part is that the translations had been right under our nose the whole time, in the Yale Law Library, reprinted in a volume called “Constitutions of the World” that had been published in Germany, but they were so obscure at that point that no one had known! I hadn’t really expected to find them, and when I did, I had to write about them. It was a herculean project, and I’m so grateful I had the opportunity to do it.”

(And why those translations are significant…)

“The translations provide two important illustrations of public meaning. On the one hand, we can use the translators’ word choices to learn how they understood the text of the Constitution. For example, there were multiple words the German and Dutch translators could have chosen for “commerce”. By investigating the words they chose and noticeably didn’t choose, we gained a better understanding of what the translators understood the scope of “commerce” to be. But we can also look at the translations and see where the translators deviated from each other’s apparent understanding or from popular commentaries to get a better idea of how different members of the founding-era public might have understood the same text in slightly different ways. In other words, while the translations help show that most constitutional text is not indeterminate, they also highlight where some of the text may be somewhat vague or subject to multiple (but usually similar and overlapping) interpretations. I also love that the translations are complete restatements of the constitutional text —no other commentary on the Constitution is complete. Other pamphlets or speakers discussed particular clauses, but of course couldn’t expound upon the entire document. But translators can’t skip, and so the translations give us interpretations, albeit short ones, of every single part of the Constitution.”