From Jacqueline Thomsen at Bloomberg Law: US Trial Judges Bring Originalism Classes to Texas Law Schools. From the introduction:
Sitting in a seminar room at a Dallas law school, a federal judge asked a roundtable of law students, “What can you do to keep the republic?”
It was the last class of the semester for the course “Originalism & the Origins of the Federal Constitution,” which focuses on what the document’s drafters intended when it was written. US District Judges Brantley Starr and Mark Pittman are among the judges who teach a version of the course at Texas law schools.
Starr and Pittman were ending the semester at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law with a discussion about the Prohibition amendments, before moving on to the role of federal judges. To close the class, Starr referenced Benjamin Franklin’s famous line after the closing of the Constitutional Convention—that the US is “a republic, if you can keep it.”
The class aims to teach on the sources of concepts included in the Constitution. It comes as judges like Starr and Pittman embrace the judicial theory of originalism, or the idea that laws should be interpreted as they were originally understood at the time of the nation’s founding.
Starr said in an interview that, as more members of the Supreme Court have said they’re originalists or textualists—using the plain meaning of the words within a statute in order to interpret the law—it’s important for future lawyers to learn how to do that.
Endorsed! (But I really hope the judges aren't teaching that originalism "focuses on what the document’s drafters intended when it was written." It should be "focuses on what the document meant when it was written.")
(Via Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog.)
Posted at 6:07 AM