The election. And then viewer mail on media for scholarship and ideas, suspense and emotional salience in judicial opinions, and a little more.

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We’ve been asking for a true originalist to take us to the woodshed for all our prior doubts and dismissiveness of originalism as a method of interpretation. Enter Will Baude.

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Special Guest: William Baude.

We made a return to the annual Tech Law Institute meeting in Atlanta and recorded a live episode about self-driving cars. We talked optimism, pessimism, political valence, regulatory challenges, federalism, trolley problems, and more.

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Causation and responsibility are interrelated, crucial, and yet puzzling concepts in law. With tort scholar Shahar Dillbary, we explore situations in which spectators “cause” accidents in a drag race that they merely witness and in which the more tortfeasors there are, the better. Also, burning Christian’s car and an update on Joe’s recent cold.

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Special Guest: Shahar Dillbary.

Is originalism required by our law? We chat with Charles Barzun about his critique of the inclusive originalists, the new movement to claim that an originalist interpretive method is not only a good choice among possible methods but is the method which is mandated by a positivist approach to our law.

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Special Guest: Charles Barzun.

Is legal writing narrative? How about judgments, appeals, testimony? We talk with Simon Stern about narrative and its techniques and effects, suspense, dicta, authorial purposes, a crazy idea for a novel, mathematical proofs, and more.

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Special Guest: Simon Stern.

The merits of going live-to-tape, RSS woes, podcasts, mailbag, judges and voting, decisionmaking machines, breaking the law by not facilitating others’ breaking the law, shipping Perceiving Law, cutting one’s favorite scene, a mysterious phone call.

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After some goofy but needful pre-pre-roll and pre-post-roll, we take with Emily Sherwin about the law and equity distinction, its relation to rules and standards, its relation to candor, how what looked like a formal distinction had surprisingly functional effects, and how to get the most out of “good” rules.

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Special Guest: Emily Sherwin.

Administrative law expert Cathy Sharkey joins us to talk about conflicting judicial approach(es) to preemption and deference - and the web of institutions and decisionmaking that is modern lawmaking.

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Special Guest: Catherine Sharkey.

Al Brophy returns to discuss, among other things, his new book on the connections between slavery, the academy, legal theory, and the judiciary.

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Special Guest: Al Brophy.