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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
Two Dogmas Of Originalism, Ian C. Bartrum
Two Dogmas Of Originalism, Ian C. Bartrum
Ian C Bartrum
In the early 1950s, Willlard Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism offered a devastating critique of logical positivism and the effort to distinguish “science” from “metaphysics”. Quine demonstrated that positivists relied on dogmatic oversimplifications of both the world and human practices, and, in the end, suggested that our holistic natural experience cannot be reduced to purely logical explanations. In this piece, I argue that constitutional originalism—which, too, seeks to define a constitutional “science”—relies on similar dogmatisms. In particular, I contend that the “fixation thesis,” which claims that the constitutional judge’s first task is to fix the text’s semantic meaning at a …
The Ministerial Exception And The Limits Of Religious Sovereignty, Ian C. Bartrum
The Ministerial Exception And The Limits Of Religious Sovereignty, Ian C. Bartrum
Ian C Bartrum
This paper explores the scope of independent religious sovereignty in the context of the ministerial exception.
The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum
The Constitutional Canon As Argumentative Metonymy, Ian C. Bartrum
Ian C Bartrum
This article builds on Philip Bobbitt's Wittgensteinian insights into constitutional argument and law. I examine the way that we interact with canonical texts as we construct arguments in the forms that Bobbitt has described. I contend that these texts serve as metonyms for larger sets of associated principles and values, and that their invocation usually is not meant to point to the literal meaning of the text itself. This conception helps explain how a canonical text's meaning in constitutional argument can evolve over time, and hopefully offers the creative practitioner some insight into the kinds of arguments that might accomplish …