Should Presidential Phone Calls to Foreign Leaders Be a Matter of Public Record?
by Michael C. Dorf In philosophy, law, and other disciplines in which hypothetical examples play an important function as "intuition pumps," a familiar argument cautions against concluding too much from so-called marginal cases. You might think it permissible for people starving on a mountainside awaiting rescue to draw straws to determine whom to kill and eat, but it does not follow that you think cannibalism is morally permissible under ordinary circumstances. Or you might think an intuition pump so outlandish and unlikely--e.g., would you kill baby Hitler? --that it is simply not worth considering. We are unlucky enough to live in a time when many questions that could be dismissed in the past as outlandishly unlikely now routinely arise due to our narcissistic norm-breaker of a president. Thus, whereas in the past we would not have worried about how to fortify our institutions against, say, a president who loses an election but refuses to accept defeat, now we must gra...