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Robert Black

@hurricanexyz.bsky.social

14K followers 390 following 49K posts

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

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · Jun 3

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

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Yeah I don't actually think it's that novel, and I think Will himself would be the first one to tell you that

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

It's interesting to me how this seems to fall out along parliamentary vs. presidential lines, but not, like, for any super obvious reason?

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

There were definitely points in history where slavery was, pretty plausibly, a humane innovation, as against the existing practice of "slaughter everybody when you win a war"

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Well,

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

"Fooled"

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Oooooh so like the worst possible answer

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Donny, buddy, you know you can just pardon George if you want to

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

You want to see Scientific Stancilism, in other words

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

How did that even work, who got to effectively control those two seats? Who were the five people mentioned in that story and why were they involved if they didn't live there?

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Part of the (mostly unspoken, I believe) reasoning of Baker v. Carr is "if we say there's just no rule at all, good golly can it ever get Worse than it already is"

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

Yeah I uhhhh, keep meaning to try to customize the design of my site, which is on ghost

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

At this point that seems likely, although I wouldn't rule out "it's already started"

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 6h

When they stopped letting Old Sarum send two men to parliament is one of the conventional markers for when Britain became a real democracy

(It wasn't just that, of course, it was part of a bigger electoral reform happening at that time)

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

(I'm not even joking, I've heard people advance with a straight face the idea that "beyond a reasonable doubt" means 90%)

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is like when a team's playoff odds on Fangraphs dip from 0.1% to 0.0%

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

😅

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Yeah uhhhhh the law world does Not know about Bayes's Theorem

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Battle of Portland goes to the home team

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Serious > significant, here?

Also lol, the intersection of these other standards with reasonable doubt is always funny. "Well uhhh I have a reasonable doubt because I don't know what 'serious risk' actually means, so..."

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

This particular little anecdote (debate about whether slurs for robots are okay immediately spills over into using those same slurs on humans) feels pretty predictable though

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Mmmm yes, many such cases

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 7h

Ohhhh yeah. They always resist giving overly specific definitions. To some extent we want to let juries be black boxes on this stuff.

Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 8h

Come now, in your heart of hearts you knew it would be this dumb

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 8h

Oh there's whole philosophy of law debates about whether the various burdens of proof are meant to correspond to numerical probability thresholds or not

(I'm very much Team Not, at least as a general matter. Preponderance of the evidence, sure, that [basically] represents 50/50)

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Robert Black @hurricanexyz.bsky.social · 8h

Lmao