Brendan T. Beery (Thomas M. Cooley Law School) has posted When Originalism Attacks: How Justice Scalia's Resort to Original Expected Application in Crawford v. Washington Came Back to Bite Him in Michigan v. Bryant (Drake Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Justice Scalia personifies the philosophical anxieties that lead judges to adopt species of textualist and originalist methods that anchor meaning to centuries past and to surface meaning. The resulting constitutional rules are so narrow that they are impossible to apply without producing absurd results. Thus, Justice Scalia’s brand of originalism and textualism, which are effectuated by embedding original expected application in the Court’s precedents and willfully ignoring semantic depth, invite future courts to manifest the kind of intellectual dishonesty and contortionism exemplified by the Court’s recent opinion in Michigan v. Bryant. This Article explores that case and, more broadly, the effects of Justice Scalia’s narrow interpretive methods on the Court’s Confrontation Clause jurisprudence. The Article is especially timely in that it addresses not only Bryant (which raised eyebrows with its attack by Justice Scalia on Justice Sotomayor) but also the role Justice Scalia’s methods played in the recent dust-up over his assertion that the Equal Protection Clause does not protect women.
Posted at 10:12 PM