Doyle-Winter Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law Lecture — Steven G. Calabresi

Steven Gow Calabresi is the Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where he has taught from September 1990 to January 2025.  In the Fall of 2024, Calabresi was the Doyle-Winter Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law and Senior Research Scholar in Law at Yale Law School. Calabresi has been a Visiting Professor in Law at Yale Law School every Fall semester since 2013.  Calabresi clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia and for Judges Robert H. Bork and Ralph K. Winter. He was a special assistant to Attorney General Ed Meese from 1985 to 1987, and he served as Deputy to Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs Ken Cribb in 1987 on the second floor of the West Wing of the Reagan White House.  Calabresi has written books on presidential power, comparative constitutional law, and the origins of judicial review.  He and Gary Lawson are the co-editors of a casebook on U.S. constitutional law, and Calabresi is also the co-editor of a casebook on comparative constitutional law.  He is the author of over seventy law review articles since 1990.  Calabresi was one of the three co-founders of The Federalist Society in 1982, and he is the Co-Chairman of the Federalist Society’s national board of directors.

"The Meese Revolution: The Making of a Constitutional Moment" (2024) is an intellectual biography of Edwin Meese III, who is the most influential person ever to hold the office of U.S. Attorney General — but almost no one knows it. Ed Meese was at the center of virtually every major accomplishment of Ronald Reagan’s transformational presidency, from winning the Cold War without firing a shot to the economic boom that by the end of the 1980s was the envy of the world. More to the point for this book, Ed Meese is the person most responsible for the rise of constitutional originalism, a style of legal interpretation that treats the text and original meaning of the Constitution rather than the policy fads of the moment as authoritative law.

In 2025, originalism is a major force in the courts, with a majority of Supreme Court justices and a raft of lower-court and state-court judges at least taking it seriously as a major contributor to judicial decision-making. That would have been unthinkable in 1985 when Ed Meese took office. At that time originalism was essentially unknown to the legal academy and almost wholly absent from the judicial process. Ed Meese turned the U.S. Department of Justice into “the academy in exile,” where originalism was developed, refined, theorized and put into practice.

This book describes Ed Meese’s central role in the rise of originalism. Meese’s story threads through virtually all important legal and policy events of the 1980s, many of which continue to shape the world of the 21st century. We are still living through the Meese Revolution.