Current Issue

In April 2012, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, along with the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund, co-sponsored a two-day conference to celebrate the publication of Jack Balkin's book Living Originalism. That conference, entitled Constitutional Interpretation and Change, featured publicly engaged scholars as well as prominent journalists, two groups that play vital but different roles in mediating social understanding and awareness of constitutional controversies. Video interviews and the full conference proceedings can be accessed at the Constitutional Interpretation and Change website. The select conference papers gathered in the Journal's current issue address the relation of Balkin's Living Originalism to comparative constitutional methods, to new textualist approaches, to practices of ordinary constitutional interpretation, and to the evolving political context and content of originalism itself. Balkin responds to his interlocutors in a thoughtful afterword, which stresses how a constitution achieves legitimacy by being taken as not only basic or higher law but "our law."

The issue will be available in March 2013. Visit our subscriptions page to order a copy today!

Volume 25, Issue 1

Winter 2013

Symposium on Living Originalism

        Sujit Choudhry, Living Originalism in India? “Our Law” and Comparative Constitutional Law

        Kim Lane Scheppele, Jack Balkin Is an American

        Jeffrey Rosen, How New Is the New Textualism?

        Neil S. Siegel, The New Textualism, Progressive Constitutionalism, and Abortion Rights: A Reply to Jeffrey Rosen

        Sara Aronchick Solow & Barry Friedman, How To Talk About the Constitution

        Michael S. Greve, The Originalism That Was, and the One That Will Be

        Jack M. Balkin, The American Constitution as “Our Law”

Note

        Cameron A. VanSant, From Opportunity to Right: Constitutional Change and the Establishment Clause