Gary S. Lawson

Gary S. Lawson 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. He is currently the Philip S. Beck Professor of Law at Boston University School of Law. He previously taught at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He is the secretary of the board of directors of the Federalist Society. With Steven G. Calabresi, he has argued that the Mueller Probe was "unlawful."

Lawson has been cited a number of times in majority opinions, concurrences and dissents written by the United States Supreme Court.

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.

In an episode of 5-4 on Originalism, Peter Shamshiri was critical of Lawson's essay, saying, "Can [Lawson] really not conceptualize the differences between a document that dictates the nature of political relations across a country and a recipe?...There are also degrees to which I think this analogy proves the opposite point: When you have a fried chicken recipe, what's your goal in making it? Is it to replicate the original fried chicken, or is it to make the best fried chicken you can? Both of those are valid goals, but that's a threshold question that you need to answer that this analogy skips right over."