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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Constitutional discourse in both the academy and the public sphere has recently included quite a bit of talk about “originalism.” But what about originalism’s great historic rival, “living constitutionalism?” What is living constitutionalism and how is it different from originalism? A preliminary answer to that question can be offered in…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction One approach to the meaning of language emphasizes the idea that meaning is conventional. Thus, when we interpret a constitutional or statutory provision, we might look for the conventional semantic meaning of the word or phrase. But there is another view in the philosophy of language that rejects the idea…
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By Ann Bartow Introduction A while back Larry Solum asked me to write a short post about feminist legal theory for his excellent Legal Theory Blog. What follows is a brief (though longer than it probably should be) overview of this scholarly subject area. With two exceptions, I don’t mention any feminist legal theorists by…
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By Lawrence B. Solum Introduction Many of the Legal Theory Lexicon entries provide tools–the argumentative moves and theoretical constructs that should be in any legal theorist’s toolkit. Lots of these are drawn from other disciplines: for example, the distinction between “Concepts” and “Conceptions” is taken from philosophy and the The Coase Theorem, with its powerful idea of a transaction cost,…