Law school can be eye-opening. Con law in particular was an interesting one. If you can make it through Marbury v Madison in your first semester of your first year and not realize that the entire American system is held together with chewing gum and baling wire and it’s a miracle it ever enabled a functional government at all, or get through Dred Scott v Sandford or Plessy v. Ferguson later on and not realize that the law should always seek justice in as far as said chewing gum and baling wire even halfway plausibly permit, then you’re either an idiot or an asshole, and probably both.

Slavish devotion to your generation’s “plain reading” of increasingly distant legalese written by – to put it euphemistically – deeply conflicted men who were indeed clever and motivated, but were also the half-educated elites of a cultural backwater, is how you end up with our current mess.