A Law School Lacked and Lost

james allan

I fell in love with the place my first week there. I was a Visiting Professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, taking a sabbatical from my home institution, the University of Queensland in Australia. That was back in January of 2013. My wife and I were to spend the first half of that year in San Diego and then, as we are both native-born Canadians, I had a second sabbatical post lined up at a university in Toronto. Of course, I knew back then that USD had some of America’s best-known scholars of the theory of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism.” I’d been invited to a few of their conferences already, and I had met Professors Larry Alexander, Maimon Schwarzschild, and Steven Smith at symposia and conferences in Australia.

So it was, then, that after a big family 2012 Christmas in Toronto we put one of our kids on a train back to his Canadian university, and the other on a plane to Belgium for a bit of French immersion before she too moved across the world to start university in Canada that fall. Then my wife and I got into the second-hand car we’d bought in Toronto and drove the 2,600 odd miles to San Diego.