Professor Richard Ekins delivers major lectures at Harvard and Princeton

Richard Ekins KC, Professor of Law and Constitutional Government, delivered two major invited lectures in the United States last month, speaking at Harvard Law School and Princeton University on consecutive days.

On 12 November, Professor Ekins gave the Herbert W. Vaughan Memorial Lecture at Harvard Law School, titled 'Questioning the Dogmas of Textualism'. The prestigious lecture series began in 2008 with an inaugural address by the late US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The following day, 13 November, he delivered the Annual Walter F. Murphy Lecture in American Constitutionalism at Princeton University, speaking about 'The Inherited Constitution'. Professor Ekins is believed to be the first non-American to deliver either lecture.

Recordings of both lectures are now available:

In his Harvard lecture, Professor Ekins examined core claims associated with textualism – a theory of statutory interpretation centred on the ordinary meaning of statutory text – and challenged their merits. He argued that textualism rests on a flawed understanding of language, legislative action, legislative authority and judicial power, and defended an alternative view that interpreters should seek to infer the intended meaning of the legislature that enacted the statute.

His Princeton lecture explored the idea of the constitution as an inheritance. Professor Ekins reflected on constitutional legitimacy, how we interpret and apply an inherited constitution, and how gratitude for a shared inheritance can coexist with the ability of each generation to amend and improve the constitution that it inherits.