Slightly greater than a month in the past, a regulation professor who helped discovered the Federalist Society, the conservative authorized group, enthusiastically endorsed a brand new regulation assessment article arguing that Donald J. Trump was ineligible to be president.

The article was “a tour de force,” the professor, Steven G. Calabresi, advised me. It demonstrated, he stated, that Mr. Trump was topic to a provision of the Constitution that bars some officers who’ve engaged in rebel from holding authorities workplace.

“Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them,” stated Professor Calabresi, who teaches at Northwestern University.

He gave the impression to be providing thought of views, and he elaborated on them in a weblog put up titled “Trump Is Disqualified From Being on Any Election Ballots.”

Last week, in a unprecedented about-face, the professor modified his thoughts.

In a letter to The Wall Street Journal, he stated he had been persuaded by an opinion article in that newspaper that the availability — Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — didn’t apply to Mr. Trump.

In that article, Michael B. Mukasey, who served as lawyer normal below President George W. Bush, targeted on part of the availability that limits its scope to individuals who had taken an oath to assist the Constitution “as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state.”

The solely class that even arguably applies to Mr. Trump is “an officer of the United States,” Mr. Mukasey wrote. But that phrase, he asserted, “refers only to appointed officials, not to elected ones.”

That proposition is just not self-evident, and the 126-page regulation assessment article that had set off the dialogue, by William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, thought of the that means of “officer of the United States” at size.

It concluded that “the ordinary sense of the text” of the Constitution, “the structure and logic of its provisions,” “the evident design to be comprehensive,” “the seeming absurdity of the prospect of exclusion of the offices of president and vice president from triggering the disqualification” and different elements “all convince us that the natural conclusion is the correct one: Section 3 includes in its coverage, or ‘triggering’ language, insurrectionists who once served as president and vice president.”

They added a plea for a bit frequent sense: “A reading that renders the document a ‘secret code’ loaded with hidden meanings discernible only by a select priesthood of illuminati is generally an unlikely one.”

In his letter to The Journal, Professor Calabresi stated he now agreed with Mr. Mukasey’s tackle the related a part of Section 3, which he known as the “disqualification clause.”

“Former President Donald Trump isn’t covered by the disqualification clause, and he is eligible to be on the ballot in the 2024 presidential election,” Professor Calabresi wrote. “I am correcting the public record on this important issue by sending you this letter.”

Mr. Mukasey’s article was not met with common approval.

“Let me be clear,” Akhil Reed Amar, a regulation professor at Yale, stated final week on his podcast. “This is a genuinely stupid argument.”

On Saturday, Professor Calabresi issued one other weblog put up, this one known as “Donald Trump Should Be on the Ballot and Should Lose.”

“Trump is loathsome, but because of a technicality in the drafting of the disqualification clause of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, the clause does not apply to Trump,” he wrote, including: “So, Trump’s name should appear on election ballots in the 2024 presidential election, but I strongly urge my fellow Americans to vote against Trump, almost no matter what else is the alternative.”

Professor Calabresi wrote that his considering had been influenced by a brand new article posted on Tuesday by two different professors, Josh Blackman of South Texas College of Law Houston and Seth Barrett Tillman of Maynooth University in Ireland, who’ve lengthy pressed arguments that some provisions of the Constitution don’t cowl the president.

Their article, additionally 126 pages lengthy, collected and thought of what it stated was “substantial evidence that the president is not an ‘officer of the United States’ for purposes of Section 3.”

It added: “Numerous sources that we cited discussed this issue; no one spoke in a ‘secret code,’ as Baude and Paulsen charge. If we are correct, Trump is not subject to Section 3 at all. If we are right, then states cannot unilaterally remove Trump from the ballot under the authority of Section 3.”

Professor Calabresi is, in fact, entitled to alter his thoughts. As Justice Felix Frankfurter put it in a 1949 dissent, “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”

In an interview on Saturday, Professor Calabresi stated his revised place was the product of research and reflection.

“I carefully reread the materials on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment applies to Trump,” he stated, “and concluded that it most likely does not.”

He added that politics had not figured in his considering. “I will support,” he stated, “any Republican or Joe Biden over Trump in the 2024 election.”