"I stand entirely behind the above footnote: behind every sentence, every phrase, every word and every syllable."

"I made no mistake, intentional or inadvertent. I retract nothing, and I do not intend to retract anything.”

Swore Seth Barrett Tillman, a lecturer at Maynooth University in Ireland, who has described himself — in a court filing — as a “lonely scholar with unusual ideas, who is unaffiliated with the popular, the organized and the wealthy.”

He has written an amicus brief — in the case accusing President Trump of violating the Emoluments Clause — presenting historical evidence for the proposition that the clause doesn't apply to the President.

As Adam Liptak describes in "‘Lonely Scholar With Unusual Ideas’ Defends Trump, Igniting Legal Storm" (NYT):

The reaction was swift and brutal. Legal historians and a lawyer for members of Congress suing Mr. Trump said Mr. Tillman had misunderstood, misrepresented or suppressed crucial contrary evidence in a second document.

Jed Shugerman, a law professor at Fordham, wrote a blog post urging Mr. Tillman to issue a correction. “One might expect,” Professor Shugerman wrote, “that when a brief before a court contains significant factual errors or misleading interpretations of evidence, the authors of that brief will offer to correct their briefs or retract the sections if they are no longer supported by the evidence.”

In another blog post, Brianne J. Gorod, a lawyer with the Constitutional Accountability Center, which represents lawmakers suing Mr. Trump, said Mr. Tillman’s account was “not accurate, not even remotely so.”

Five legal historians, including Professor Shugerman, filed their own friend-of-the-court brief. They said Mr. Tillman’s had “incorrectly described” the evidence in a footnote in his brief.

But the brutal experts were wrong, and in the end they had to concede and apologize.

So let this be a lesson to you who count the experts, those of you who hooted and guffawed at this comic bit:



UPDATE: On October 3rd, all 5 of the historians retracted a footnote and apologized.

Each of us would hope for more generous treatment from another scholar who criticized our own work in this fashion, so it was unfair not show the same level of respect to Professor Tillman.