Washington Free Beacon Erwin Chemerinsky, law school dean at the University of California-Berkeley, is an accomplished, extensively published scholar. In 2017 he was named Americaâs most influential legal educator by National Jurist magazine. Formerly the founding dean of the law school at the universityâs Irvine campus, he received awards from both the Anti-Defamation League and the American Association of Law Schools, and has litigated cases before the Supreme Court.
Considering his august academic standing, Chemerinsky is also, as the title of his latest book indicates, remarkably opinionated and sometimes rabidly partisan: I know of no other respected contributor to the debate over whether interpretations of Americaâs fundamental law should be guided by the intent of its authors or ratifiers who has gone so far as to dismiss his learned opponentsâ views as “worse than nothing.”
Before proceeding, a word of explanation is in order. The term “originalism,” reportedly coined by one of its previous academic critics, Paul Brest, in the 1980s, refers to a movement that developed among conservatively inclined legal scholars in the last decades of the 20th century as a reaction against what were perceived as the abuse…
