Very nice indeed from Steve Vladeck. But. Steve’s subhead: “Efforts to backfill [fake] historical support for President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order wouldn’t have been possible without a Court that has shown itself to be open to such academic work.” My view:

Share

<https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/219-drunks-lampposts-and-the-birthright> <https://www.stevevladeck.com/cp/193346644>

Share DeLong’s Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before

My view: Very nice manifesto from Steve Vladeck.

But.

English-tradition legal argument and scholarship drank from a poisoned chalice at the very beginning. At the start of the 1600s, after all, Edward Coke was in the business of using fair means and foul to use legal process and doctrine to constrain the alien Scottish monarch James I Stuart. Thus we have Chief Justice Best:

I am afraid we should get rid of a great deal of what is considered law in Westminster Hall if what Lord Coke says without authority is not law..

Thus, as my father likes to say, “it is turtles all the way down”.

It was turtles under the activist pro-corporate Lochner Court. It was turtles under the activist Warren Court. It is turtles under the activist neofascist Roberts Court.

Historical truth is simply not a constraint, and has been a constraint only when justices really want it to be. Which is why people should read that nutboy Steve Rodell’s absolutely brilliant Nine Men.

More brief thoughts below the fold:

Read more