Season 5, Episode 27 (Show 236): Fallon’s Doctrine – Special Guest Michael Dorf

July 23, 2025

The passing of a great constitutional scholar, Richard Fallon, brings a tribute from Professor Amar and our guest, Professor Michael Dorf,  a friend and close colleague, along with an appraisal and review of his impact on  the world of constitutional law.

CLE Credit Available for this episode from podcast.njsba.com.

We pay tribute this week to a titan in the field whom you may not have heard of.  Professor Richard Fallon, the Joseph Story Professor of Law at Harvard, passed away last week.  As you will hear from his collaborator and friend, our guest Professor Michael Dorf, Dick Fallon had a deep impact in the law and the academy, and did so with grace, class, and integrity.  The parallels between his career and Professor Amar’s are striking, but so is the divergence in their constitutional approaches.  And this makes for a fascinating and instructive episode as we probe, rather deeply, the nature of these divergences and how they appear in various places in the law.  Meanwhile this also brings us back to a fundamental matter for this podcast, namely, the nature of and validity of originalism as opposed to or in concert with other methods of interpreting and understanding the constitution and applying it in today’s, and tomorrow’s, America.  That America must now, sadly, go on without Dick Fallon, but it will do so informed by his career and his greatness.  We are fortunate to have Michael Dorf to show us why this is so.

(LAWYERS AND JUDGES ARE ELIGIBLE FOR CONTINUING LEGAL EDUCATION CREDIT by visiting podcast.njsba.com after listening.)

Show Notes:

How to get Continuing Legal Education Credit for listening!

Virtually all lawyers and judges admitted to practice anywhere in the USA can obtain CLE (Continuing Legal Education) credit after listening to this episode by visiting podcast.njsba.com.  You do not have to be a New Jersey lawyer or resident or admitted to the NJ Bar; essentially every state has reciprocity arrangements with New Jersey.  When you visit the site you fill out a form and provide the code Andy read during the episode, pay a small fee, and within two weeks you will receive the certificate from New Jersey.  It couldn’t be easier.  Thanks to the New Jersey Bar Association for making this possible!  Note, too, that other podcast episodes from our “back catalog” now qualify for this credit as well.

Click to go to the website for CLE credit

Implementing the Constitution, Professor Richard Fallon (1997)

Professor Fallon writes the forward to the Harvard Law Review in 1997 (1996 Supreme Court term), discussing “Implementing the Constitution,” a discussion of the implementation of a legal system required to realize the vision of the Constitution.

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The Limits of Socratic Deliberation, Professor Michael Dorf (1998)

Professor Dorf’s turn to write the forward to the Harvard Law Review in 1998, “The Limits of Socratic Deliberation.”

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The Document and the Doctrine, Professor Akhil Amar (1999)

Professor Akhil Amar rounds out our trio of consecutive forwards to the Harvard Law Review in his 1999 masterwork, “The Document and the Doctrine,” laying out a theory of constitutional interpretation quite different from that of his illustrious predecessors in these pages.

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