The sixth paper at the USD orignalism works-in-progress conference was by Yvonne Tew (Columbia Law School): "Originalism at Home and Abroad." The paper is forthcoming in the Coulmbia Journal of Transnational Law (2014). The commentator was Bradley Miller (University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law).
The main contribution of the paper is to examine how originalist arguments are used in Malaysia and Singapore; it finds that they are used, albeit in somewhat different ways. The significance goes way beyond the particular case studies in the paper, though. It's becoming something of a cliche that constitutional originalism is an American phenomenon (and thus properly regarded as odd, or at least unusual, in the constitutional world). That may seem correct if one's only reference points are, say, Canada and Germany. But this paper (along with other work by, for example, David Fontana, Lael Weiss and Ozan Verol) shows that this isn't right — originalist arguments are actually fairly common if one looks broadly around the world.
Posted at 6:52 AM