The essential premise of fascism is that the individual has no existence save as part of the collective. I've been wrestling with this ever since it became clear that Trump is going to get back into power last night. So much of my identity is wrapped up in
After a hiatus of slightly more than two months, here, finally, is the second part of my series on How (Not) to Reform the Supreme Court! This time, I'm covering what I consider to be the single most important piece of any court reform effort: court-packing, these days
My How (Not) To Reform the Supreme Court series got slightly interrupted by my month off from writing here. But yesterday Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), one of the good ones, introduced a court reform proposal, and there's one particular feature of it that I wanted to comment on:
As I mentioned in my introductory post, one of my ambitions for this site is to create a resource library for those interested in learning about constitutional theory. This post is the first of what I hope will be many in that vein: a basic primer on the six so-called
Today the Senate Democrats introduced what they style the "No Kings Act," which purports to overrule Trump v. United States. Now, you may be saying, wait a minute, Trump v. U.S. was a constitutional case, how can Congress overrule it by ordinary legislation? The answer is that
President Joe Biden has just this morning published an op-ed in the Washington Post sketching out his plan for Supreme Court reform. I want to say right off the bat that, completely aside from the details of his plan, this is great to see. We absolutely need court reform, and
This site is basically not for doing political commentary. But I think there's an interesting political-philosophy wrinkle to this week's rather momentous political developments. One theme of the first few hours after Joe Biden withdrew from the race for president and Vice President Kamala Harris became
The other day, while discussing court reform on Bluesky, I described the arguments against construing the phrase "good behavior" in Article III as meaning life tenure as "sophomoric textualism." What did I mean by that? The idea here is that there's a phase everyone
There were reports yesterday that Joe Biden is preparing to endorse a significant package of Supreme Court reforms. As a result, I spent basically the whole day having discussions online (mostly on Bluesky) about those rumored reforms, and specifically whether or not they're constitutional. I will have more
Eminent historian and public intellectual Kevin Kruse has a piece out today arguing, in essence, that we shouldn't view the failure of Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 "court-packing" plan as a cautionary tale for court reform today. I agree with that as stated! And the way
Most case captions are pretty random. Baker v. Carr? What's that about? The name doesn't really tell you anything. It's just two random names: who knows what Mr. Baker and Mr. Carr were fighting about? Some captions, though, feel absolutely perfect, an exact distillation
Cross-posting here: I have a piece today in Liberal Currents about why judicial review is essential for our democracy and that means we have to attack and dethrone (and then rebuild) the Supreme Court!
I can't believe I'm the one who has to say this. So, last week the Supreme Court formally overruled Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, one of the landmarks of administrative law, in a case called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo. People are generally freaking out,
Back in law school I developed a strategy for doing large amounts of casebook reading very quickly. You can learn the vast majority of what you need to know about a legal decision by just reading the essential facts of the case – what happened, who are the parties, what'
Last week, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a piece of legislation restricting the use of "addictive feeds" by social media companies. This set off a ritualistic bit of Discourse about how these kinds of social media regulations interact with the First Amendment. I happen to have written
This site's tagline declares it the "musings of a constitutional philosopher." But what is a constitutional philosopher? Well naturally enough it's someone engaged in constitutional philosophy. But what is that? So far as I can tell – and I have done a bit of poking
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
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This is The Consulting Constitutional Philosopher, a brand new site by Robert Black that's just getting started. Things will be up and running here shortly, but you can subscribe in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date and receive emails when new content