Yale Law School will inaugurate an originalism conference, the school announced. (I wonder where they got that idea?)
From the official announcement:
Yale Law School is proud today to announce the launch of a major new intellectual initiative, “The Rosenkranz Originalism Conference at Yale Law School.” This program, many months in the making, will bring prominent academics and jurists to Yale for a day-long conference each semester to discuss and debate various approaches to and critiques of originalism in constitutional thought and practice. The initiative will be led by Professor Steven G. Calabresi ’83 and Professor Akhil Reed Amar ’84 and is sponsored by — and was largely inspired by — Professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz ‘99.
Calabresi, who co-founded the Federalist Society while a student at Yale Law School and went on to work closely with leading champions of originalism in the 1980s — including Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia, and Ed Meese — currently serves as Chairman of the Board of the Federalist Society. …
Amar, who styles himself a “liberal originalist,” has also written widely about the text and original meaning of the Founding-era Constitution and its subsequent amendments — perhaps most notably in his prizewinning books, The Bill of Rights: Creation and Reconstruction (1998) and America’s Constitution: A Biography (2005) and in his 2000 Foreword to the Harvard Law Review. Calabresi and Amar will also regularly co-teach a seminar at Yale Law School on originalism, which will be closely coordinated with the Rosenkranz Originalism Conference. …
Professor Rosenkranz has published several groundbreaking articles in the Harvard Law Review and the Stanford Law Review, including The Subjects of the Constitution, which is one of the most downloaded articles about structural constitutional law of all time. … While a student at Yale Law School, Rosenkranz worked closely with Amar, and in recent years he has worked alongside Calabresi as a member of the Board of Directors of the Federalist Society.
So now there will be at least three schools with dedicated originalism conferences — USD, Georgetown and Yale. Who's next?
(Thanks to Andrew Hyman and Michael J. Perry for the pointer).
More here from the Yale Daily News, including:
The conference, which takes place on a Friday once every semester, will feature two originalist thinkers, one each in the morning and afternoon, who will have conversations with Amar and Calabresi in a crossfire format. The event will also host a keynote address by a prominent jurist such as Justice Neil Gorsuch, Amar suggested. The event will end with a roundtable discussion with students, the keynote speaker, originalist thinkers and both Calabresi and Amar.
And this:
During an admitted law students reception for the Federalist Society, Yale Law School Dean Heather Gerken announced the launch of a semiannual originalism conference … Around 40 current and admitted Law School students — current or prospective members of the Federalist Society — as well as a few professors attended the reception.
Posted at 6:12 AM