Videos of the symposium I wrote about in the previous post are available here, and having watched parts of it, I don’t feel as bad about missing it.
While Richard Epstein’s keynote address was interesting, it didn’t seem to me to have much to do with what the symposium was supposed to be about, and I’m at a loss to see more than the most tangential connection between what Epstein said and how his talk was described in advance. I didn’t hear any argument “that the underlying linguistic problems should drive the analysis” or that trying “to tailor rules of interpretation to institutional settings” would “detract [from] understanding how and why language works.” I don’t go to a lot of law-school symposia—I’m just a simple country lawyer—so maybe it was naive of me to expect that the program that was actually presented would reasonably approximate what was described in advance.