Over at Balkinization, my colleague Samuel Moyn and Yale student Pranjal Drall have a new post on the birthright citizenship debate. As a brief history of recent scholarly and constitutional arguments on birthright citizenship, it is helpful. But they seem to ultimately want to make a point about scholarly engagement, and on that the post seems much less helpful.
That history serves a broader point about constitutional politics with which I am in entire agreement -- legal arguments (and scholarly arguments about law) work in a political environment, and they gain traction in that broader environment not just because of their objective merits but because of their pragmatic utility in the moment and the extent to which they resonate with the ideas and interests of a broader audience. My arguments about any given topic are always correct (of course!), but whether anyone else agrees with them or thinks they are even worth reading, let alone discussing, is beyond my control. Being correct (bracket what that means and how one would know) is not a sufficient condition -- and is probably not even a necessary condition -- for being embraced by others, whether those others are academic colleagues, government officials, or members of the general public. Oddly, others do not always recognize my brilliance, or the brilliance of my arguments.
