Texas A&M Law REview Symposium

History and Memory in Constitutional Interpretation

Friday, February 28, 2025
8:30 am - 4:30 pm
5.75 CLE credit hours
Texas A&M University School of Law
1515 Commerce Street, Fort Worth, Texas, 76102
Free, in-person only, Registration required
Click here for the schedule

The 2025 Texas A&M Law Review Symposium will elaborate and discuss the augmented status of historic interpretation on the United States Supreme Court. It will center on Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin’s new book, "Memory and Authority: The Uses of History in Constitutional Interpretation" (Yale University Press 2024). Panels will address various issues raised by the book with special reference to the conservative constitutional revolution. Discussants include legal and historical thought leaders with diverse opinions and ideologies.

This symposium will address the Roberts Court’s reliance on “text, history, and tradition” in a variety of constitutional areas, including reproductive rights, the Second Amendment, and the Religion Clauses. The Court’s conservative Justices have increasingly turned to historic claims to justify and rationalize their decisions to overturn precedent and to hold legislation unconstitutional. Originalism has of late played a decisive role in some cases. However, in some decisions the Court inexplicably dispenses with originalism. A particularly interesting example of the Court’s interpretive direction is the most recent affirmative action case, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. History played varying roles in the majority’s, concurrences’, and dissents’ invocations on history, which reflected the differing ideological perspectives on the Court. 

• Author Jack M. Balkin, Yale Law School
• Samantha Barbas, University of Iowa School of Law
• Sir Philip C. Bobbitt, Columbia Law School
• Henry L. "Hank" Chambers, University of Richmond School of Law
• Jonathan Gienapp, Stanford University
• Neil S. Siegel, Texas A&M School of Law / Duke Law School
• Jed Handelsman Shugerman, Boston University
• Julie Suk, Fordham University School of Law
• Nelson Tebbe, Cornell University School of Law
• Alexander Tsesis, Florida State University College of Law
• Anne Twitty, Stanford University
• John Fabian Witt, Yale Law School

CLE information:

• This course has been approved for Minimum Continuing Legal Education credit by the State Bar of Texas Committee on MCLE in the amount of 5.75 credit hours, of which 0 credit hours will apply to legal ethics/professional responsibility credit.
• Texas A&M School of Law, as the CLE sponsor, will submit CLE attendance to the State Bar of Texas by March 31, 2025 for all verified attendees (in-person or online) who are members of the State Bar of Texas and provided their valid Texas Bar Card Number at registration.