scholarship
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Contrarians at the Gates
On responsible scholarship and engagement with heterodox ideas Continue reading
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On Responsible Scholarship
A Reply to Stepan Wood, Meinhard Doelle, and Dayna Scott Continue reading
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The Ivory Tower Prisoner’s Dilemma
Why law journals are useless, and why we can’t do without them Continue reading
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Immuring Dicey’s Ghost
Introducing a new article on the Senate Reform Reference, constitutional conventions, and originalism ― and some thoughts on publishing heterodox scholarship Continue reading
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Why Codify
Apologies for my silence of late. I’m afraid blogging will be light for another week or so. In the meantime, however, here’s something related to the topic of my last post, the codification of law. It won’t be news to those versed in the history of Québec law, but it’s something that I, in my ignorance, Continue reading
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Constitutional Job Placement
In a post on Concurring Opinions, Gerard Magliocca asks an interesting question about what importance, if any, should attach to the fact that a constitutional provision invoked in a case has never been applied by the courts, or has not been applied in a very long time. It is, arguably, a specific instance of the broader Continue reading
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Real Intellectual Life
I have recently come across a great paper by Mark D. Walters, “Dicey on Writing the Law of the Constitution”, (2012) 32 OJLS 21. (UPDATE: The original link is no longer working, alas, and the paper is no longer freely accessible.) It’s not brand new (it was published last year), but as prof. Walters, unfortunately, Continue reading
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Risk and Reward
I wrote recently about whether scholarship (in philosophy and in other areas, such as law) can make a difference, and whether this matters. As it happens, PrawfsBlog has been running an interesting series of interviews with scholars whose work has been cited by the US Supreme Court, asking them, among other things, what they thought Continue reading
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Ideology in Constitutional Scholarship
Is most writing about constitutional law and theory (in the United States, but perhaps also in Canada) “intellectually corrupt”? In a post on the Bleeding Heart Libertarians blog, Jason Brennan, a philosopher and economist from Georgetown, says that it is. But, while his description of constitutional scholarship is, unfortunately, right, his explanation and evaluation of Continue reading
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The Best and the Rest
A friend has drawn my attention to what seems like an interesting book, Laughing at the Gods: Great Judges and How They Made the Common Law by Allan C. Huntchinson, a professor at Osgoode Hall. I haven’t had a chance to start reading it yet but I will eventually, because prof. Hutchinson’s topic is directly Continue reading
Double Aspect 