Pohlman on Revisiting the Fried Chicken Recipe @zach_pohlman

Zachary B. Pohlman is publishing Revisiting the Fried Chicken Recipe in volume 98 of the Notre Dame Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Twenty-five years ago, Gary Lawson introduced us to legal theory’s tastiest analogy. He told us about a late-eighteenth century recipe for making fried chicken and how we ought to interpret it. Lawson’s pithy essay has much to be praised. Yet, even twenty-five years later, there remains more to be said about legal theory’s most famous recipe. In particular, there remains much more to be said about the recipe’s author, a person (or, perhaps, group of people) whom Lawson does not discuss. Lawson’s analysis of the recipe leads him to an “obvious” conclusion: the recipe’s meaning is its original public meaning. If we consider those who wrote the recipe and their joint act of recipe-writing, however, I question whether that conclusion remains so obvious. This Essay takes a closer look at the chefs who wrote the fried chicken recipe and their act of recipe-writing that produced it. I argue that the meaning of the fried chicken recipe is not its original public meaning but is rather the meaning the chefs intended the recipe to have, even on Lawson’s own terms.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

See also 

Gary Lawson, On Reading Recipes...and Constitutions, 85 Geo. L.J. 1823 (1997), and the later Michael C. Dorf, Recipe for Trouble: Some Thoughts on Meaning, Translation and Normative Theory, at 85 Geo. L.J. 1996-1997.