While I'm on the subject of originalism and constitutional interpretation, I really should link to Timothy Sandefur's brilliant article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy entitled Liberal Originalism: A Past for The Future and to Randy Barnett's equally brilliant article, An Originalism for Non-Originalists. Both articles help flesh out the idea of liberal originalism, an originalism based upon the application of the founding principles found in the Declaration rather than on the letter of the law at the time of the founding.
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Mark your calendars for the launch of ASU's new Origins Initiative on April 6, 2009. Tickets go on sale next week and the event will be broadcast live online.
With ID proponents increasingly and more loudly decrying Darwin as the reason the Holocaust happened, Bogused-Up copies of The Origin being circulated by Banana Loving Christians, and attacks on real science and real science education in the US continuing as though there were no Constitution or c
I was thinking about the timeline that brought us here, today, from the origin of the Universe up through the present day.
Randy Barnett, one of my favorite legal scholars, has a new article available on SSRN called Scalia's Infidelity: A Critique of Faint-Hearted Originalism.
I for one will take a look. :)
I sometimes think we do ourselves a disservice when we restrict the "founding" principles to the textual efforts of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, et al. We do owe the French a bit of praise as well, particularly Molière, Voltaire, and Rousseau, when we examine the "original." Just a thought!
Eric-
I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts on the matter. You might be interested in Positive Liberty, a group blog that I write for. All four contributors are advocates of liberal originalism (liberal in the classical sense, not the modern political sense). Tim Sandefur, whose article I link to above, is one of the contributors there. In addition to him and Randy Barnett, you might want to check out Scott Alan Gerber's work in this regard.
I'd actually recently started following Positive Liberty, as it happens.