At Balkinization, a symposium on Ken Kersch, Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press 2019).
Of particular originalist interest:
Ann Southworth, The Power of Constitutional Frames
Mark Tushnet, Originalism in Political Science and Law
Gary Lawson, Right About the Constitution
From the latter:
… I have spent the better part of forty years immersed, as a welcomed outsider, in the conservative legal world. During that time, I have had extensive conversations, often spanning many hours at a time, with conservatives of numerous stripes and backgrounds. This has happened in all kinds of settings, ranging from academic fora to clerkships to home life (I have been housemates with conservatives on multiple occasions). These conversations have covered topics ranging from constitutional theory to public policy (including abortion, on which I am at least partially pro-choice) to religion (I profess none) to ethical theory (I’m a Randian) to epistemology and metaphysics (ditto). I emerged from those forty years of spectacularly rich and high-level discussions knowing nothing at all about Leo Strauss, Harry Jaffa, Francis Schaeffer, John Courtney Murray, Bishop Sheen, Richard Weaver, Russell Kirk, Eric Voegelin, or just about any of the other luminaries who fill up Ken’s volume. Yes, I had heard a few of those names (like Strauss and Voegelin) come up in passing in a few conversations, but until a few months ago I could not have written a coherent paragraph about any of them. Even when discussion with my conservative friends turned to first philosophy or life-and-death issues, those names simply did not come up (though C.S. Lewis and Frank Meyer came up with some regularity, as I recall).
To be sure, I was hanging around with Federalist Society folks, who emphatically are not the subjects of Ken’s book. But surely those folks, especially the generations of folks that I encountered in the 1980s and 1990s, when I had most of these conversations, would be familiar with the broad thrusts, and quite possibly the intricate details, of the intellectual threads that Ken chronicles. And those folks are the people who became, might become, or had something to do with the coming and becoming of others as, judges. They did not speak, even in private, the language that Ken describes. Accordingly, when Ken predicts that “[i]t may soon be the case that we will not be able to understand even conservative judges and their approach to textual interpretation and judicial role and duty without an appreciation for the deeper restorationist or redemptivist visions in which they have long been embedded, and their elaborately constructed historical memories, principles, and philosophies” (363), I think he is mistaken – or at least the prediction is not supported by the available evidence.
Agreed. The extent to which the conservative political science world does not interact with the conservative legal world, and vice versa, is astounding.
Posted at 6:39 AM