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One sees contrarians across Academia. These are people who really like the attention they get by adopting a point of view that's at odds with the consensus.

Contrarians are different from crackpots and denialists. Crackpots and denialists actually believe what they say. Contrarians often don't. Or they don't care, at any rate. It's about the attention. If the consensus moves in another direction, they'll switch and adopt the position the consensus just abandoned.

Obviously, contrarians can sometimes make money by writing books or going on the lecture circuit. They might also show up as cable news talking heads. These presumably help cement a contrarian's standpoint, but it's the attention that matters. "Look at me! I'm controversial!"

That said - this stuff about a third term is plainly contrary not only to the consensus among Constitutional law scholars, but to the Constitution itself. There's no gray area. Anyone with the basic ability to read and write can see this.

I'm beginning to wonder if there's more than just contrarianism going on with him. Is it money? A desire to be close to power? Something organic? Has he switched columns from "contrarian" to "quack?" I don't know.

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In my own field, there was a small community of academics in the 1980's through early oughts we sometimes called the "Flat Earth Society." These were people who could not accept that birds are living theropod dinosaurs. They called themselves the BAND (Birds Are Not Dinosaurs).

The evidence that birds are dinosaurs is as conclusive as that showing human beings are mammals, and it hasn't been treated as controversial since around 1990, but these few dug in their heels. New evidence would be dismissed or explained away with increasingly convoluted and decreasingly parsimonious arguments, some of which crumbled when more evidence came up. When the first non-bird dinosaur with evidence for feathers was found in the mid 1990's, they argued that the feathers (which were short fibers resembling fur or down) were actually internal collagenous fibers that were exposed as the animal decayed. But then they found a non-bird theropod with actual vaned feathers - not short fuzz, but actual feathers with a rachis and barbs. The explanation? A bird had died, and then a dead dinosaur had fallen on top of it. That lasted until they found several more of the feathered non-birds. Eventually, they began to claim that these animals - animals they'd sworn up and down couldn't be related to birds - were, in fact, birds that had evolved to look just like non-bird dinosaurs.

Most BAND members were crackpots. They were true believers. But there was one whose opinions were so bizarre that we wondered if his motivations were different. He would make claims that anyone with a single class in comparative anatomy could see were silly. I once moderated a session at a professional meeting, and he was the last speaker. His words were being contradicted by his own slides. The other moderator and I sometimes glanced at each other with a look of dismay; I mean, was this dude really saying what we thought he'd said? Why didn't he just turn around and look at the bloody pictures behind him? The ones he'd set up for his talk? Did his students consider an intervention? It was madness.

Some of us suggested that people studying bird origins should spend a few months claiming that they were wrong all the time, and that birds are related to extinct crocodile relatives or some other extinct reptile, but not dinosaurs. Most of the BANDers would throw a massive "I Told You So!" party, but that one outlier would probably start insisting that birds must be dinosaurs.

This type of contrarianism, at least, was harmless. What Dershowitz sometimes does is not.