SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Canonical Cases and Other Quodlibets: A Response to Professor Fallon. “In Ex parte Merryman, Chief Justice Taney issued three orders. Unfortunately, Professor Fallon does not specify which “direct judicial order” it was that President Lincoln (purportedly) refused to enforce. I discuss each of the three orders in turn.”

Plus: “In other words, doctrinalism relies on empirical assumptions about the legal world. It is that its high priests actually know what they are talking about—that expertise is possible, that they have that expertise, and that they are willing to deploy that expertise (neutrally). But if cases are essentially unreadable, or if doctrinalism’s proponents refuse to do what they have promised to do and what they must do to make their jurisprudential system virtuous, then we might just as well decide to democratize the interpretive process, and allow the vast unwashed to determine their political fate through elections and by direct reference, not to precedent, but to the text of the Constitution.”