Dirty Word or Dirty Little Secret?

March 2, 2017

Dirty Word or Dirty Little Secret?

My talk on originalism at the Université de Montréal

Last week, I spoke at the Université de Montréal about the two articles Benjamin Oliphant and I have co-written on originalism in Canada. Joanna Baron of the Runnymede Society organized the event, Matt Harrington, of UdeM’s common law programme, hosted it, and Dwight Newman commented on the presentation and the papers. I am very grateful to them all for making it happen! Here’s the video:

Ms. Baron and I also recorded a podcast for the forthcoming Runnymede Radio series (you can listen to a teaser here). It should be available in the coming weeks.

During my visit to Montreal I also gave a guest-lecture at McGill, which was as fun as speaking there always is, and I am very grateful to Johanne Poirier who gave me the opportunity to address her constitutional law class.

Constitutional law

constitutional interpretation, originalism

Posted by:

Leonid Sirota

Law nerd. I teach public law at the University of Reading, in the United Kingdom. I studied law at McGill, clerked at the Federal Court of Canada, and did graduate work at the NYU School of Law. I then taught in New Zealand before taking up my current position at Reading.

One response to “Dirty Word or Dirty Little Secret?”

Gareth Morley

March 9, 2017 at 1:49 pm

I enjoyed your talk and found little I could disagree with. I thought Professor Newman’s comment was interesting. Any theory has a tension between descriptive adequacy (“I can explain why the courts do what they do, even if they don’t know it”) and normative bite (“I can explain why the courts should change what they are doing”). Will Baude is trying to address this problem, but I think the trade off is unavoidable.

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Double Aspect