I want to share with you a letter from fellow TPM Reader DA. He makes a point I fully agree with but didn’t make clear enough in yesterday’s post. I fully agree there is such a thing as legal expertise. I’ve made that clear in my actions over a couple decades by paying for some of the very best (and priciest) legal counsel — mostly though not exclusively on 1st Amendment and libel law. It of course goes beyond this. Law, in its largest scope, is a complex set of rules and practices that we as a society have agreed on — sometimes explicitly, usually implicitly — to govern ourselves by and through which we resolve the countless range of disputes — civil and criminal — that arise among us. But it is in the nature of any specialized and professionalized craft to cast a penumbra of authority beyond its actual area of expertise.

With a hearing on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship now on the calendar, I want to return to a basic point we’ve discussed several times over the last year. Given our experience living mostly in “normal” times, many of us are used to the idea that the law evolves over time. When judges create new case law, the law evolves and changes. And we accept that it has “changed” — in a certain meaning of the word — even when we may not agree with the change. But with so many other things that have changed slowly since 2016 and then rapidly from early 2025, these are outdated ideas, outdated understandings of how the world and the law works.

Birthright citizenship is a key example of this.

Birthright citizenship is clearly, explicitly and incontestably written into the U.S. Constitution. It’s the country’s fundamental law and more than 150 years of American history have been lived on that basis. There’s a reason why no one has doubted this over all those years even if many have opposed it.