Things to Read This Week (3/30/26)
Article II and the Civil Service, by Aaron Nielson & Chris Walker. An interesting paper on possible limits to the unitary executive revolution — and one of many interesting things I’m looking forward to at the Second Annual Chicago Constitutional Law Conference.
From the archives, In Memoriam Edward H. Levi, in the 2000 University of Chicago Law Review (on JSTOR). Scholar, Teacher, Dean, President, Attorney General — it’s hard to think of another person who had Levi’s three-way combination of intellectual ability, integrity, and political savvy.
On Scholarly Engagement, by Keith Whittington. A blog post by Keith Whittington explaining why he decided to engage on the merits with the meritless legal arguments in defense of the birthright citizenship executive order. As Keith says “There are an endless number of bad ideas in the world, and I do not have the time and energy to explain why all of them are bad,” but sometimes an idea gets enough objective traction that people need to explain what it is wrong with it. The contrary argument, made in a series of blog posts by Pranjal Drall & Samuel Moyn, seems to have learned exactly the wrong lesson from the road to NFIB v. Sebelius.
On my read, Whittington doesn’t call the legal argument on the other side “meritless,” unless you’re using “meritless” to mean simply incorrect, which seems unusual.