In commemoration of Constitution Day, the Claremont Institute has just published an essay by Professor David Forte.  In his essay, titled “Noble Sinners,” Professor Forte highlights the role that our Constitution played in holding the country together in its early fractious years.  He explains how the drafters of the Constitution steadily evolved into bitter political rivals in the years following the country’s founding.  Within a dozen years, “[t]he founding’s great lights had become openly contemptuous of one another.  Political differences seemed impossible to bridge.”

Professor Forte argues that the country was able to survive these deep personal and political divisions among its leaders because the Constitution they had written “had already become an object of reverence,” serving as a “a fundamental charter that binds the people against themselves.”

The essay is based on a lecture Professor Forte delivered last year at Cleveland-Marshall, in the law school’s Constitution Day commemoration.

Professor Reginald Oh:

• Spoke at the California Western School of Law’s Law Review symposium on immigrant rights last spring. He presented a paper entitled, Dehumanization, Immigrants, and Equal Protection. The article is forthcoming in the California Western Law Review.
• Is working on a chapter for the book, Critical Race Judgments. His chapter is a rewrite of the Supreme Court’s 1927 school segregation decision in Gong Lum v. Rice.
• Published an article, “The Supreme Court Post-Kavanaugh,” on The Loyal Opposition website. The article contends that one seat should be added to the Supreme Court to have ten justices sit on the Court.
• Published an article, “How We Should Think About Impeachment,” on The Loyal Opposition website. The article contends that the debate over impeaching President Trump should focus less on whether he has committed federal crimes and more on his fitness to wield executive power.
• Has been appointed to the Board of Directors for DemCast, a nonprofit organization engaging in social media political advocacy.

Chris Sagers, the James A.Thomas Professor of Law, appeared in prominent news media on breaking antitrust news. He spoke with the Wall Street Journal in an article attempting to explain the many possible lawsuits that state and federal regulators may be planning against the big tech platforms.  He also appeared on Forum, a public affairs program on KQED public radio in San Francisco, to discuss the remarkable news that 50 separate U.S. states have joined in an antitrust investigation of Google.

Chris Sagers, the James A. Thomas Professor of Law, will give a presentation at the on his new book, “United States v. Apple: Competition in America,” as part of the popular and widely attended Weekly Forum series of the City Club of Cleveland. His book, which will be published by Harvard University Press on September 16, concerns the so-called “eBooks case” of 2012-2013, in which the Justice Department accused Apple and several publishing firms of fixing the prices of electronic books.

The event is Wednesday, October 2, 2019, at noon.  Tickets are available here.

Professor Milena Sterio met with a group of first-year Oberlin College students, on August 28, at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.  The students were visiting Cleveland as part of their first-year orientation, and Professor Sterio held a mock class for the students on the topic of Somali piracy.

Professor David Forte’s article, “The Faith and Morals of Justice Scalia,” has been published in the Intercultural Human Rights Law Review.  In the article, Professor Forte explains Scalia’s fundamental view that “statutory and constitutional law” was fundamentally “positivistic,” with “validity derived from the will of the democratic electorate.”  The article discusses Justice Scalia’s devout Catholicism, examining how parts of Justice Scalia’s Catholicism “might have accounted for his particular style of judging and why he believed that originalism and textualism were morally required of judges.”

The citation is David F. Forte, “The Faith and Morals of Justice Scalia,” 14 Intercultural Human Rights Law Review 68 (2019).