If you haven’t been following the ongoing debate between law professors Lawrence Solum and Jack Balkin about the proper method of constitutional adjudication and judging in general, I’d suggest you go and catch up: Solum’s latest salvo, which has links to the earlier posts by both sides (scroll down to Tuesday’s post on “Fear and Loathing in New Haven” if the Blogger links are busted) is an excellent illustration of how serious legal theory and jurisprudential philosophy can be written in a style that is chatty, conversational, accessible, and immensely entertaining. Balkin’s last post argued, in a nutshell, the usual argument of legal academics on the left: that you have to drink their Kool-Aid and abandon hope of following the Constitution as it was written, or you don’t get a lot of the results that we’ve come to take for granted as popular precedents. I had read this and thought, “I know this isn’t right, but I can’t quite put my finger on the precise problem with it.” Solum has the answer.