Can a sitting president be indicted? Can he pardon himself? After he leaves the White House, can he be convicted of obstruction of justice for actions taken while in office? Can the granting of a pardon be an independent crime?

This post offers no answers to any of those questions. (My colleague Eric Posner and I discuss all of these issues in a longer draft article posted on SSRN.) My claim here is more modest: Much of the disagreement—though not all of it—on these and similar constitutional questions arises from the fact that when commentators offer answers, they are often answering one of four fundamentally different queries: a literal question, a doctrinal question, a predictive question, and a normative question. And of these four questions, only one really deserves our sustained attention.

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