Let me see if I have this straight: In a Politico essay, Cass Sunstein tells us that there “are just four personae” of Supreme Court justices—“heroes, soldiers, minimalists and mutes.” But it turns out that “no member of the court is consistently heroic,” so that would seem to mean that there is no real heroic persona. Further, although Justice Scalia has “important commonalities” with “the iconic judicial hero,” Chief Justice Warren, Scalia is also sometimes a soldier—which would seem to mean that no single persona identifies him. And no justice is, or ever could be, a mute “because the justices have to issue rulings and explain themselves in the process,” so they “cannot do their jobs if they are mutes.” So I guess that there aren’t four personae after all.

Oh, well—just one essay composed a bit too hastily? No: It turns out that Sunstein’s essay is drawn from a new book of his, Constitutional Personae (which I gather is an expanded version of this 2013 paper of his).

As it happens, ten years ago, I critically reviewed another book of Sunstein’s that also attempted to divide everything into four. I explained there why Sunstein’s proposed minimalism was an incoherent jumble. In response to Sunstein’s Politico essay, John McGinnis has an excellent post arguing that minimalism “is the antithesis of a principled jurisprudence” and “is incompatible with the rule of law.”

Perhaps there are four types of law professors: Cass Sunstein and everyone else.