My conviction has a name!

Keith Whittington believes as I believe. It might seem presumptuous to put it that way, since he’s an eminent legal scholar and I’m just a curmudgeon who excelled at Constitutional Law in law school.

But I say it that way anyway because I believed it before I read this and discovered that my belief has a name, “departmentalism.”

In my simple mind, departmentalism follows from the oath officials take to uphold the Constitution, not to follow the Supreme Court’s lead, however bogus, in matters of constitutional interpretation.

Were I a judge of an inferior court, I would almost invariably follow precedents I considered erroneous, but with a written caveat in each such case that I do so merely to spare the judicial resources required to reverse me.