Gary S. Lawson

Gary S. Lawson (born October 14, 1958) is an American lawyer whose focus is in administrative law, constitutional law, legal history, and jurisprudence. He was a law clerk for Judge Antonin Scalia of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia from 1985–86 and clerked for Scalia again during his 1986-87 term on the United States Supreme Court. Lawson is currently a professor at the University of Florida Levin College of Law. His immediate prior position was the Philip S. Beck Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. And he previously taught at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. With Steven G. Calabresi, he has argued that the Mueller Probe was "unlawful."

Contributions to legal theory

Lawson is a notable scholar of and proponent for the constitutional doctrine of originalism.

"On Reading Recipes—And Constitutions"

In 1997, Lawson wrote a law journal article on the doctrine of Originalism, "On Reading Recipes—And Constitutions", in which he argued that interpreting old text means trying understand how those words would have been understood at the time they were written and illustrated his point by imagining someone trying to cook fried chicken using a very old recipe, the instructions for which contained vagueness due to the dated nature of the recipe. Lawson suggests that someone in that situation would do some research to attempt to understand what the author of the recipe meant, and that this is the essence of the practice of Originalism.

Selected works