So, Trump just bombed Iran. Apparently. He said he did anyway, which technically does make it less likely to be true, but I think we have independent confirmation. There is about to be a big debate about whether this was legal for him to do. Congress did not pass any
Welcome back to Constitutional Perspectives! Last time, I began to tell the Constitution's origin story – well, the Level One version of it, anyway. We left off in the mid-1780s, after the Treaty of Paris had ended the War for Independence. But the constitutional order of 1776, as formalized
This morning, in United States v. Skrmetti, the Supreme Court held that a Tennessee ban on treatment for gender dysphoria in minors does not offend the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Several of the Justices would have reached this conclusion on the grounds that the Fourteenth Amendment does
Welcome back to Level One of Constitutional Perspectives! Last time, I covered what the Constitution is: the kind of thing it is, the basic function it performs. Next, I want to canvass where it comes from: the history, briefly told, of how the Constitution came to be. In fact it
Welcome to Level One of Constitutional Perspectives! In today's lesson we'll be covering a simple question: what is this "Constitution" thing, anyway? As I mentioned in the introduction to the series, Level One is geared for readers who have zero prior knowledge of American
Announcing a new project here at The Evening Constitutional! As I wrote shortly after last November's election, one of my ambitions for this site is to create a library of materials explaining American constitutional law, from the ground up. I am hereby announcing the start of that project,
If you listen to me talk about constitutional law for long enough, you are going to hear the name Charles Black. He is the single greatest influence on my thinking about law and political philosophy; he also happened to be my grandfather. I want, therefore, to write a short piece
(How's that for a clickbait title??) David Hackett Souter, former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, died on Thursday. We learned this yesterday, and the encomia poured in. Everyone loved Justice Souter, well, everyone except the right-wingers convinced he'd betrayed them. He was, as everyone saw,
I know I said I mostly wasn't going to use this newsletter to do legal analysis of contemporary controversies. However. I think it's worth spelling out at some length everything that's wrong with the Trump Administration's claim of authority in the case
The Supreme Court, in a per curiam opinion that seems like it was probably written by Chief Justice John Roberts, just vacated District Judge Boasberg's order preventing the Trump Administration from "deporting" Venezuelan nationals to a slave camp in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act
Over the last couple of weeks we've been having an exceptionally tiresome debate about birthright citizenship. Two conservative legal scholars, Randy Barnett and Ilan Wurman, have been arguing in various public fora that the overwhelming scholarly consensus that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means what it
In the last few days, people have started wondering whether we're in a constitutional crisis. Sensible enough, given everything that's going on. But not everyone is convinced. There's certainly something afoot, they grant, but perhaps it is only a "constitutional moment," not