Replies

I don't have to tell him what he already knows and has published.

This is very distinguished legal company, and I confess to wondering about my qualifications to be a commentator on Justice Scalia's paper. I do not seem to have too many of them. I have never been to law school, so I have not experienced that intellectual rebirth which Justice Scalia says every first-year law school student experiences. I am not a jurist. I am not a legal philosopher. I am not even a legal or constitutional historian. I am just a plain eighteenth-century American historian who happens to have written something on the origins of the Constitution. I am not sure that this suffices.

Source: Gordon Wood, from his essay which appears in A Matter of Interpretation, Federal Courts and the Law, by Antonin Scalia, 1997, p. 49.

Gordon Wood is well-qualified to do what you cited, "Gordon Wood spent the fall term, 2003, teaching the Revolution and the origins of the Constitution at Northwestern Law School." That is the HISTORY, not law.

In #1079, did I not state, "It is interesting to note, however, that the legal community has an appreciation for {Wood's] insight into the historical foundations of American jurisprudence."

And did you not take issue with that statement?

And doesn't my listing of Wood's recent academic achievements confirm what I said in #1079?