The Federalist Society has announced some details of the 2010 student symposium: It will be on “Originalism 2.0,” and it will be held at the University of Pennsylvania Law School on February 26-27, 2010. The panels, debates, and discussions include the following:
Originalism: A Rationalization for Conservatism, or a Principled Theory of Interpretation?
Originalism and Construction: Does Originalism Always Provide the Answer?
Does the Originalism of the Fourteenth Amendment Guarantee Justice for All?
Originalism, Precedent and Judicial Restraint
Originalism in Criminal Procedure: Ancient Checks or Newfangled Rights?
Details are available from the link above. Looks like a terrific symposium, as always. If you’re an active student member of the Federalist Society, you should try to go. The timing is particularly interesting because it’s the weekend before the oral argument in McDonald, so no doubt McDonald will be prominently addressed. (Although why are they using Originalism 2.0? I updated to Originalism 3.1 several months ago, and it’s much more stable.)
UPDATE: On an only tangentially-related front, the Federalist Society is also hosting a cool panel in Silicon Valley tomorrow:Data Collection, Privacy, and Competition. I don’t know if they’re going to talk about originalism, but with the FedSoc, that’s never a bad bet.