Bloomberg Law, US Trial Judges Bring Originalism Classes to Texas Law Schools:
Sitting in a seminar room at a Dallas law school, a federal judge asked a roundtable of law students, “What can you do to keep the republic?”
It was the last class of the semester for the course “Originalism & the Origins of the Federal Constitution,” which focuses on what the document’s drafters intended when it was written. US District Judges Brantley Starr and Mark Pittman are among the judges who teach a version of the course at Texas law schools.
Starr and Pittman were ending the semester at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law with a discussion about the Prohibition amendments, before moving on to the role of federal judges. To close the class, Starr referenced Benjamin Franklin’s famous line after the closing of the Constitutional Convention—that the US is “a republic, if you can keep it.”
The class aims to teach on the sources of concepts included in the Constitution. It comes as judges like Starr and Pittman embrace the judicial theory of originalism, or the idea that laws should be interpreted as they were originally understood at the time of the nation’s founding.
Starr said in an interview that, as more members of the Supreme Court have said they’re originalists or textualists—using the plain meaning of the words within a statute in order to interpret the law—it’s important for future lawyers to learn how to do that.
Starr said if justices like Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson publicly say they use originalist or textualist interpretations, “then it’s probably malpractice to not look at what seven, eight, or nine votes on the Supreme Court are looking at.” …
Starr and Pittman are Donald Trump appointees to the Northern District of Texas. Starr said that while Republican appointees are teaching the course now, he hopes judges appointed by presidents of any party will do so in the future.
The class was created by US District Judge Charles Eskridge, another Trump appointee who sits in Houston. Eskridge said he came up with the idea for the course in 2008, when Justice Clarence Thomas said that he wished there had been a class on the history of the formation of the Constitution when he was in law school. …
Eskridge and Starr have taught the class together at the University of Texas at Austin. That teed up Starr to teach in the future, and he asked Pittman, based out of Fort Worth, to do it with him. They co-lead the class at SMU and Texas A&M School of Law.
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