Well as you can tell we haven’t been using this space much, but I may as well jot down what scholarship I managed to get out in the last year — two short law review articles, one long article, one textbook edition, and one online symposium piece.
The two short articles were the first and last things I got out this year. The first was Constitutionalizing Interstate Relations: The Dark Side of the Force, a short piece on conflicts of law. I think it’s the first time I’ve ever given a talk at a conference and then had my remarks turned into a short publication, so it has a pretty colloquial style, but I thought I had some important enough points to make that it was worth getting out there one way or another.
The last was The Real Enemies of Democracy, my response to Pam Karlan’s Jorde Lecture on The New Countermajoritarian Difficulty. When I wrote this back in February I hoped this would seem irrelevant a year later, but alas it doesn’t.
The longer article was The Misunderstood Eleventh Amendment, with Steve Sachs, in the Penn Law Review. Repeat after me: “Eleventh Amendment Immunity” is not the same thing as “sovereign immunity.” “Eleventh Amendment Immunity” is not the same thing as “sovereign immunity.” Using these terms interchangeably is a dead giveaway that you aren’t up on the literature.
We also got out the fourth edition of our constitutional law casebook: The Constitution of the United States, with Michael Stokes Paulsen, Michael McConnell, Sam Bray, and me. We have new materials on the two Trump impeachments, the state action doctrine, and lots more. I try not to be one of those professors who spends lots of time hawking his textbook, but if you teach constitutional law and don’t like your book, you really might like ours. We have a good teachers manual, lots of sample syllabi, and are always happy to talk and give advice to new adopters.
I also wrote something for an online symposium at the Duke Center for Firearms Law on corpus linguistics and the Second Amendment: Heller Survives the Corpus. The basic question is whether various discoveries in corpus linguistics undermine the individual-rights view of the Second Amendment. My conclusion is that so far, they don’t.
These aren’t writings, but I also launched two new podcasts, of course — (Dissenting Opinions and Divided Argument) — the former of which included a great “deep dive” into originalism with Adam. Look for a cool new deep dive in the first half of 2022.