Hello!
Welcome to The Evening Constitutional: Musings of a Consulting Constitutional Philosopher! This site is meant to be an outlet for me to share my thoughts about issues of constitutional law and political theory. In this introductory post I'll tell you a little about myself and my vision for the site
My name is Robert Black. I am currently a Ph.D. student at NYU, studying political theory. My background prior to that is in constitutional law, and for most of my adult life I wanted very much to be a constitutional law professor. Then, uhhhh, then Trump happened. Particularly since the winter of 2020-21 my faith that the Constitution can get us out of this mess has been seriously shaken, which is what inspired me to go study political theory. Oh, and the world of higher education is blanketed more and more heavily by a toxic miasma. Add it all together and I've never felt less certain what exactly I want the next phase of my professional life to look like.
Hence this site. For now I imagine I will predominantly be using it as a blog, a place for me to share my thoughts on issues of constitutional law and/or political theory that are in the news or the discourse or in the scholarly work I've been doing. There's a pretty big range between a "tweet-level" thought and a "law review article-level" thought, and that's where this site comes in. Eventually I may have somewhat grander ambitions, somewhat more cohesive projects in mind, educational resources and the like. How much I am able to explore those ambitions will no doubt depend on how much time I am able to devote to this site, which will itself depend on how much support it can garner.
On the title: it is, of course, a play on "morning constitutional," which unfortunately would imply that I will generally post in the morning, and therefore would simply not do as a title haha. In fact I imagine that most of my posting will be done in the evenings, though I do not exactly promise that; nor do I promise to post something every day, certainly not at first. I will write when I have something to say.
As for the tagline, "constitutional philosophy" is a term I like to use to refer to my field of study, ranging as it does from constitutional law to political philosophy. To the best of my knowledge, the phrase is not in use by anyone other than myself. "Consulting," meanwhile, is a nod to Sherlock Holmes, who called himself a "consulting detective." The conceit is that this site is an effort to pursue the scholarly life outside the usual institutional channels. If you are interested in learning a bit about the Constitution or about political theory, I am available for hire, for the low, low price of $5 a month!
