Ep. 4: Beyond Textualism

Professor Holger Spamann, an expert in corporate law, economics, and finance, argued during a September 2022 lecture at Harvard Law School that the differences between the two most widely used legal systems in the world, common law and civil law, are not as stark as many lawyers imagine.

During a March 2023 lecture at Harvard Law School, Professor Laura Weinrib, a legal historian and constitutional and labor law scholar, described the arc of labor union power in the 20th century and its relationship to political spending.

Professor Adrian Vermeule, an administrative and constitutional law expert, argued during an October 2022 panel discussion at Harvard Law School that the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia began his career on the bench as a proponent of the administrative state and only later evolved into its most fearsome foe. His remarks were followed by responses by Andrew Oldham, a judge who serves on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and fellow Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig.

During a lecture in the fall of 2022, former presidential candidate and U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro explained his belief that the nation’s cities are not only bouncing back from the COVID-19 pandemic but also becoming more equitable for residents.

Professor Guy-Uriel Charles, an expert on civil procedure, elections, and race and the law, discussed what he sees as the demise of America’s “civil rights consensus,” and what he believes might come next during a lecture he delivered at Harvard Law School in March 2023.

During a February 2023 lecture at Harvard Law School, Professor Daphna Renan, a scholar of presidential power and administrative governance, argued that the judiciary should not always have the final word on the Constitution. Instead, Renan believes the U.S. should move toward a more political constitutionalism, which would wrest some of the power from the Supreme Court and share it with democratically elected bodies like Congress.

In March 2023, University of Chicago Law Professor William Baude took on textualism, the increasingly common approach to legal interpretation that emphasizes the plain language of a statute. During a lecture at Harvard Law School, Baude argued that, in some cases, textualists must consider unwritten law to arrive at the correct interpretation.

A leading expert on torts, Professor John Goldberg explores nuisance law and its implications for what he called “today’s biggest litigation” in torts, a field of law that defines what counts as wrongfully injuring another person. His remarks came in a lecture he delivered at Harvard Law School in March 2023.

Civil rights leader Sherrilyn Ifill, who served as the seventh president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, examined the role of race and racism in bringing about what she sees as the current democratic crisis in the United States during a lecture at Harvard Law School in November 2023.

Just three months after stepping down from the U.S. Supreme Court, in September 2022, Justice Stephen Breyer joined Harvard Law School Dean John F. Manning to discuss his time on the nation’s highest court, the job that most shaped his career, and why his questions at oral argument were so famously idiosyncratic.