Robert Black
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hurricanexyz.bsky.social
Robert Black
@hurricanexyz.bsky.social

Constitutional scholar, general law nerd, Izzet mage, bear lover, Mets fan.
Trans rights are constitutional rights!
Uphold Yang Wenli Thought
He/him
https://www.eveningconstitutional.net

History 54%
Political science 16%
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I have an announcement!!

Introducing a new project at The Evening Constitutional: Constitutional Perspectives!

This is a series of explanatory essays aiming to be of use for readers with any level of prior knowledge of constitutional law

eveningconstitutional.net/introducing-...
Introducing: Constitutional Perspectives!
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 Americ...
eveningconstitutional.net

Now I should say, I agree that packing will not fix this, not right away at least

One problem, of course, is that it's actively bad when things that are not in truth legitimate are made to seem legitimate

Yes

I think this is understating the problem considerably

It is precisely because we care about things like an independent judiciary that we support court-packing, imo!

If you described any of this stuff as a psych experiment you'd be laughed out of the IRB

You know, I've just been musing about that, how Spanish culture is, to say the least, no more indigenous to these shores than British culture

(No very clear conclusion or anything, just idle contemplation)

No one, apparently (which is to say, the circuits, and also the state supreme courts)

Do you think Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) was correctly decided? Because this is absolutely how that opinion conceives of itself

Ehh, I don't think I said that specifically here. Have definitely said it elsewhere

To be clear, I support court-packing. Just, not in this weird, issue-specific kind of way

But in any case, it's clarifying that what we're disagreeing over is whether judicial review is good or bad

Personally I like the individual rights provisions of our Constitution, and want to see them vigorously enforced, yes that means against enforced against majoritarian institutions

That's one way to look at it

Here's another: the role of judicial review in a constitutional democracy is to ensure that the government stays within its constitutional bounds

Several of those were specifically to overturn bad Supreme Court decisions!

The dream of limiting judicial review to "clear" cases cannot ever be realized, and frankly should not be

People do keep dreaming of it, though

Oh I just actively disagree with this

...a lower court that disregards them. No way to maintain that without also giving the Court itself an opportunity to reverse its prior decisions.

...the latter because, among other things, the People have the right to choose the composition of their Court on an ongoing basis

Oh, also, jurisdiction-stripping would rob the precedent you want to insulate of any real force. The way S.Ct. precedents are enforced is that the Court can reverse...

Also separately, both jurisdiction-stripping and trying to mandate the partisan balance of the Court are bad ideas

The former in that it tends to create the perception that your measures aren't actually constitutional & you're trying to hide from that fact...

If you want to overturn specific cases, and place them beyond the reach of future courts, do it by constitutional amendment

The device you suggest here is basically a mechanism for allowing Congress to overrule any constitutional decision, which is to say, to destroy constitutionalism

ehhhh

respectfully disagree, I do not like this kind of approach at all

Ha ha oh yeah, that happened

I'd be curious to see stats on turnout by married vs. unmarried women, though. That would be really interesting and I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like that

Oh, sure, like informal/private barriers? I can believe that. Certainly turnout was lower for women than for men at first, although I think the gap narrowed a lot by '28

When this really changed for good was basically the '70s, because of women's lib and feminism and such

Uhhh that's not really true, women's suffrage as such just plain works, (white) women are voting en masse in the 1920 election (albeit at lower rates than men) and especially from 1928 on

Obviously, yes, universal suffrage is still not a thing b/c of race

It actually takes the concept of "Law and Order" seriously, unlike conservatives who incant that phrase but don't actually mean it

Yeah exactly

The concern is to get it right. Everyone, basically, recognizes that locking up the wrong person is an L for the police

Basically this is because Reconstruction is an all-consuming transformation of the constitutional order in a way that none of the rest of it really is

I am famously on the low end here. Do not think the 12th Amendment is plausible lol. Civil War/Reconstruction for sure. I can see an argument for 19th Amendment, and for Civil Rights Act/Voting Rights Act as dividing lines, though I wouldn't be inclined to count either of them