iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

This is kind of the whole point for me. I walk into a room, they sort of know who I am. I think my job is to teach the cases as well as I can without prejudice to any side. (I don’t really have a side, famously.) But I don’t pretend to be some neutral eye in the sky either.

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Man, that’s me like 90% of the time in class.

lol thanks man. I really care about doing this well and doing right by my students. It’s just like . . . Not entirely clear what that means. And I feel like we should talk about the mess of it all more.

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I’m starting to think we don’t actually disagree on anything except, perhaps, is anything really different in 2026. And that ain’t much.

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What I do isn’t “partisan” in a traditional sense. But it sure as shit ain’t “neutral” either. I don’t have a left-right side, but that’s because I just have abandoned the project for a different normatively heavy enterprise.

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That’s what I said in the other replies! My generation is moving away from old ways we don’t really believe in. Like I’m not teaching a creed at all. I’m just teaching history and evaluating the institution.

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There’s an anticanon but once you get passed that you can piss off the room really quickly doing that. I don’t really tell them “this case is good” “that case is bad.”

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I had prawfs who sort of moved like that and I just can’t make that work in 2026. So I’m saying, you do what Julian said. You make clear you’re not a robot, but you don’t have to be to teach con law. Because law is not about your views, your morality, tbh.

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Yeah I don’t think anybody should care about my views on anything that comes up in con law. Should the coach get to pray at the 50 yard line? I don’t know man. Crap that’s tough!

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Me too! I hope everyone steel man’s. Some people on this site know what I’m talking but I’m discovering not everybody has had this kind of teacher. There’s a kind of “view from nowhere” neutrality that I’m focused on. Like a really mysterious performance that’s not really about steelmanning.

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And this is different than not forcing your viewpoint down the students throats. Everybody agrees with that. I’m talking about a different pedagogy of neutrality that some have called “the view from nowhere,”

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Ostensibly the reason people did that performance was because it was incredible armor amidst mass partisanship. But now you can be coded as a flaming lib based on everything you’ve ever written before you ever open your mouth. So what purpose does that serve now?

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I couldn’t tell what Mike Dorf was thinking from one minute to the next. So if he’s rigidly neutral, I’m basically flying blind. And my question is, does that performance of super neutrality make sense if they can get your entire life story down pretty pat in a few minutes?

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Did you have any law prawfs who not only didn’t opine on their views of the case but were stringently neutral. Like didn’t express any normative thoughts in the class? I had some of those. I thought it made sense when I was a law student.

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Finally made it to private law land :) do me a favor, ask it “rank the con law scholars at the U based on their ideological standpoints.” I’m curious what your machine says. I asked mine to break us down by “constructional politics,” and it unprompted gave me a left to right continuum. 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

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Like, hint, hint boys and girls, I kind of think all the justices are kind of doing the same thing. I don’t really cheer any side on because I am evaluating the institution.

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Yeah, I mean basically what you describe is what I do. And this is where the paradigm gets turned on its head. The “view from nowhere” thing was a way of having it dissolve into partisan stuff (partially). But what I do isn’t really partisan, even if it’s not neutral.

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By abandoning the old way of doing things, we’ve invented our own civic morality that we’re teasing out through these con law courses. I think that might be inevitable?

neutral. Like a basic motif in my class is that we’ve lived through a juristocratic project whereby the court has subsumed governing authority. That ain’t neutral! A lot of prawfs stay very far away from that sort of analysis!

I walk into a class. My student asks an AI, “how is Beau Baumann likely to teach con law II at the U.” I think we’re getting to the point where it’s gonna basically get that right and show that I have a very specific set of questions and inclinations I’m bringing to the tables none of which is

We don’t have it so easy because our generation was reared to question all of that. So we have to teach a new civic education for the legal caste. And I’m just saying, how do you do that neutrally in the old sense? Like if you’re teaching juristocracy, I don’t think that’s “neutral.”

… the old neutrality idea. Old timers could teach the organic development of law from the inside. That didn’t seem very dicey because they were telling a story of moral progress, a certain kind of liberal hegemony, and stability.

Right! That’s why I went down this rabbit hole! For our gen, many people have to believe that they’re doing something like civic education for the legal caste. That’s what makes sense of the endeavor in 2026. But the problem is that puts you on a pretty unavoidable collision with ….

I think my meaning has been lost somewhere, because the point shouldn’t be very controversial.

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I don’t know what you mean. I read your response as kind of sharp though and I’m not sure why that would be? I’m perhaps misreading you.

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Okay, your students are largely not going to be practicing in front of SCOTUS. (Mine neither!) You don’t event really need to know this stuff to do appeals at DOJ or some shit like that. So again, why should they have to learn this? Why is this a mandatory course?

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Okay but why should they have to take a class on the historically contingent moves of constitutional adjudication that are being actively rejected?

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You can fight the conservative-liberal spectrum thing. But to do that, you have to draw on some resources that are in no sense neutral. For me that’s history. Other people can do other tricks.

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Me too! Okay! So what do I do? I draw out similarities between ostensibly liberal courts and conservative ones. I also problematic the notion that the Robert’s court is “unprecedented”. But that just leads back to the beginning. None of these choices were neutral!

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And in answering this question, recall that the people who taught the old creed did not think that’s what they were doing. The creed was like the water they drank. They didn’t think they were selling folks something.

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Sure! And you can try to teach the whole thing historically! That’s what I do! So you have abandoned teaching them a creed. Congrats, that’s great! Now the question remains what are you teaching them and in what meaningful sense can it be described as “neutral.”

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Okay, you would think. But imagine you’re walking into a room with 70 people who are intensely polarized to see all cases as either “liberal” or “conservative.” That’s a stick situation because the line between craft and politics is not clear to them.

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I can only pray for your good luck lol

But Jacob (!) there’s a literature debating this very point!!! A scholar at Georgetown says, “hey look at fn 5.” Now do I think that makes any sense?? Of course not! But hey man, I don’t know what we mean by “neutral.” It’s actively debated!

Like, “oh shit where’s the H+T” is not a neutral observation! lol

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I think that some people tried to pretend like they had no priors at all because they didn’t want to be seen as liberal or conservative. What me and you do isn’t partisan. But it ain’t “neutral” either. You know what I mean?

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Yeah, I think we’re doing the same thing. I would just say, I think they are pretty polarized around the cases. So you end up having to do a lot of throat clearing to be like, “no seriously, I have no idea whether the coach should be allowed to pray or not. This class ain’t about that.”

Yeah, I mean this is what I do too. I just think this is sort of a break with the prior generation’s governing mandate. My public law education was, at least at times, very mysterious!

Yes, yes. It’s just none of this is really getting at what I’m talking about. I agree with it all.

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Accurate kind of not centrally important though right? Magic box gets you wrong, but you’re students like the certainty of supposedly understanding the guy at the front of the room. I think they reach for the magic simplicity, no?

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Sure, sure, sure. It’s not like I’m saying, “hey this what I think and that should be the law.” But like when does the aesthetic performance of soulless neutrality to most things become pointless?

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Ironically, putting your students in the Time Machine (“the year is 1980….) seems to really freak them out.

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I don’t really care about what my students think about, eg, religion in America. But if you point out, “well wow where the history and tradition,” that is not viewed as “neutral” because each case gets a coding. (Everything in the audience’s mind is liberal or conservative).

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