It seems like every time I turn around, I’m reading about another new article by somebody named Andrew Tutt. In the past two months, I’ve seen a lot of different articles go up on SSRN (usually via the inimitable Larry Solum). Most recently was Blightened Scrutiny, whose abstract begins with the hyperbolic claim that “There is perhaps no fate worse than a declaration that one’s property is blighted,” but looks like an interesting take on an important topic.
Before that were two articles on textualism — one called Fifty Shades of Textualism, and one called Treaty Textualism, which argues that “Textual treaty interpretation — Textualism in all but name — was thought to be a requirement of the law of nations at the time of the Constitution’s adoption.” Professor Michael Ramsey called the latter article “a very important article that, because of its international orientation, might be overlooked by constitutional scholars.”
Then I remembered that he was the same person who’d written The Improbability of Positivism, a short (and in my view, utterly wrong!) piece on theoretical disagreement and legal positivism. Apparently he also wrote a piece on software as speech that Instapundit linked to, and has put five other articles on SSRN this year.
I’ve never met Tutt. Apparently he graduated from Yale Law School a few months ago and is now working at Gibson Dunn. But he sure is producing interesting pieces at an astounding pace, especially for somebody who’s been out of law school for less than six months.