I am blogging from a wonderful conference at the University of Melbourne entitled "The Invisible Constitution: Comparative Perspectives," a Roundtable of the International Association of Constitutional Law (IACL). We are in the middle of the second panel, where my colleague Yvonne Tew has just finished presenting her paper entitled "Malaysia’s Invisible Constitution." The first session included terrific papers, including Caitlin Goss's "Interim Constitutions and the Invisible Constitution" and Patrick Emerton's "Thoughts on the Unwritten/Invisible Constitution." Lulu Weis made an especially interesting intervention by way of metalinguistic negotiation over the meaning of the phrase "invisible constitution," suggesting that it should be used to represent conflicts at a metatheoretical level.
I just arrived in Melbourne yesterday morning. On Friday, I attended a spectacular conference at Brigham Young University on "Corpus Linguistics and the Law." This was an important and pathbreaking event--the first in my knowledge to undertake a systematic exploration of corpus linguistics and the interpretation of legal texts. Chief Justice Tom Lee of the Utah Supreme Court discussed his pioneering work, and Stephen Mouritsen discussed his important work.
After the IACL roundtable concludes on Tuesday, I'll be attending a workshop at Monash University on Wednesday; I am especially grateful to Jeff Goldsworthy of Monash for arranging this event and I'm looking forward to discussing work-in-progress with Jeff, Dale Smith, Patrick Emerton, and Tria Gkouvas.
On Thursday, I'll be flying to Chicago for a conference entitled "Developing Best Practices for Legal Analysis" at the University of Chicago. There will be papers by an impressive group, including:
William Baude, University of Chicago Law School,
Adam Chilton, University of Chicago Law School
Anup Malani, University of Chicago Law School
Curtis Bradley, Duke University School of Law
Melissa Carlson, UC Berkeley School of Law
Katerina Linos, UC Berkeley
Frank Easterbrook, University of Chicago Law School
Richard Epstein, University of Chicago Law School
Richard Fallon, Jr., Harvard Law School
Thomas Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School
Nicholas Stephanopoulos, University of Chicago Law School
Abbe Gluck, Yale Law School
Bernadette Meyler, Stanford Law School
Richard Posner, University of Chicago Law School
Frederick Schauer, University of Virginia School of Law
Barbara Spellman, University of Virginia School of Law
Lawrence Solum, Georgetown University Law Center
Cass Sunstein, Harvard Law School
Adrian Vermeule, Harvard Law School
Omri Ben-Shahar, University of Chicago Law School,
Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, New York University School of Law
Blogging should proceed as usual during this period, but I hope readers will understand if posts go up at irregular intervals between now and about a week from today.
