At 46 a.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, I was on a plane somewhere over Connecticut. I was flying from Logan to LaGuardia, on my way from my home near Boston to teach my second week of class as a baby professor at New York University Law School, when the pilot told us we were going into a holding pattern because a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I did not know it then, but my career would be shaped by the events and aftermath of that day. Half of the books I’ve written are about the Middle East and the trajectories of war, terrorism and democracy there. The other half have focused on the U.S. constitutional system, especially its protections of speech and civil liberties, both of which have been deeply inflected by the war on terror. As for my teaching, my current students take for granted a broken world that, in many ways, began that day.前一年我申请法学院教职时，没人对我法学院之前获得的伊斯兰研究博士学位表现出丝毫兴趣。突然间，情况不同了。纽约大学法学院院长带我上城，到比尔·克林顿的基金会办公室见他，介绍我是将负责组织一场与这位前总统同台的国际会议的教员。我在耶鲁法学院的导师告诉我，我应该写一本关于伊斯兰教、民主以及可能发生什么的书。他把我介绍给一位经纪人，经纪人又把我介绍给一位编辑，编辑同意出版这本书。

In my books about the Middle East, I argued for the U.S. to change its policies in the away from supporting dictators and toward allowing democratic experiments by movements that saw Islam and democracy as compatible. I wrote about what we owed Iraq after our invasion; about the moving efforts of Islamic democrats in the aftermath of the Arab Spring; and about the tragedies of the Syrian civil war and of Egypt’s semicollective decision to abandon democracy after a very brief experiment. The arc was one of hopeful beginnings and ultimate failure. I continue to believe that the deep problem for constitutional governance in the Middle East is not Islam itself, but rather the broken systems associated with oil monarchies and military dictatorships. But I am certainly chastened, as are many Arabs who hoped that they could improve their own lives through democratic self-determination.与此同时，在过去二十五年里，美国的总统权力出现了非同寻常的扩张，而隐私权和其他宪法权利则相应缩减。这些趋势始于9·11事件之后不久，当时乔治·W·布什政府在国外发动反恐战争，并声称拥有前所未有的国内监视权力。与其他自由派宪法学教授一样，我曾极力反对该政府在关塔那摩湾及其他地方的拘留政策。巴拉克·奥巴马本人曾任宪法学教师，但他成为总统后，其政府却未能关闭关塔那摩。随后，奥巴马政府接受了使用无人机袭击——包括针对海外美国公民的袭击——以一种致命得多的手段取代了布什政府的拘留策略。

至少布什和奥巴马扩大总统权力时，还是以国家安全之名进行的。唐纳德·特朗普总统的违宪越权，则大多是为了自我扩张。对伊朗的战争未经国会授权便发动，且至今仍在继续，人们主要批评它愚蠢，而不是批评它违宪——这表明，我们似乎已在多大程度上放弃了那种要求对外长期敌对行动须经国会授权的宪政设计。

我作为宪法学教授的工作，已变成一场竭尽所能去支撑我们的宪政体系及其旨在保护的自由的事业。总统们并非唯一该受指责的人。保守派最高法院——其多数席位在特朗普任内得到巩固——发动了一场宪法革命，而令人震惊的是，在这场革命中，总统的权力甚至比以往更大。最高法院在2024年作出一项日后将被视为其最令人费解的判决之一的裁决，宣布总统不能因其为推进公务而采取的行为承担刑事责任。

我的一些最聪明的年轻左翼宪法学同事已经转而反对最高法院这个机构。我完全理解他们对当前保守派多数所作裁决的失望，我也有同感。但冰冷而严酷的现实是，无论是总统还是国会，都没有任何真正兴趣去维护宪法权利和规范。最高法院是我们制度中唯一能够捍卫法治、基本权利和分权制衡的机构。仅仅因为它现在做得不好，并不意味着我们就应该进一步削弱它的权力。

It’s as though those younger colleagues have forgotten the ways the Supreme Court protected and expanded fundamental rights, including rights to equality and liberty. That apparent forgetting of the courts’ capacities is a product of the last 25 years of jurisprudence, in which the courts have not only failed to stem rising presidential power but have extended it. Here, too, Sept. 11 is in the background. A good number of my law students this fall were not yet born when I started teaching, the week before the towers fell. To them, our constitutional mess is business as usual and the broken politics of the Middle East are an immemorial legacy. But their world has been profoundly shaped by the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. reaction at home and abroad.过去的25年是美国不断尝试与失败的时期。要避免奥萨马·本·拉登所期望的衰落，就必须逐步重建美国的制度。这反过来不仅需要力量和勇气，还需要对我们能够取得的成就抱有乐观态度。

诺亚·费尔德曼是观点专栏作家。他是哈佛大学法学教授，其最新著作是《成为犹太人：上帝、以色列和犹太民族的新指南》。