Dust off the Constitution

I mentioned in a post below recently an observation few public voices have mentioned, but I’m starting to hear from some concerned friends who are scholars and writers.

Over the past few decades, judicial activism has hammered away at a re-crafted reference point for civil and human rights, and the Constitution is not usually even required reading in university classes on constitutional law. No kidding. They read case precedent…..of cases established by liberal judges operating on the theory that the Constitution is a ‘living breathing document’.

So how the next president sees all that is going to be decisive for this nation for at least the next generation.

Now I see at NRO’s Bench Memos that Ed Whelan has the breaking news that some schools are actually going to study the Constitution in constitutional law again.

The George Mason University School of Law has instituted a requirement that first-year law students take a course, titled The Founders’ Constitution, that (as this course website explains) “will require students to read a large number of important original legal sources familiar to the founding generation, ranging from Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights to the Federalist (and Anti-Federalist) Papers, along with constitutional debates at the Philadelphia Convention and in the First Congress.”  (HT:  Volokh conspirator, and GMU law professor, David Bernstein.)

Those who have not suffered the detriment of a modern legal education may not find this newsworthy.  Surely, they might suppose, courses in constitutional law must require students to immerse themselves in study of the founding materials.  Alas, so-called constitutional law has come to be thought to be synonymous with the last few decades of Supreme Court decisionmaking, and I’d be willing to bet that the typical constitutional-law course pays about the same attention to the founding materials as my 1984 Harvard Law School course with Larry Tribe did—which is to say, zero.

The question always arises in these type of stories….who’s paying attention, and who’s making the decisions?

George Mason sees the situation and says ‘we can do better.’

“While a few law schools offer narrowly-focused elective classes dealing with constitutional history, none has a comprehensive, required course comparable to The Founders’ Constitution.”

Why not? Someone finally saw that the emperor had no clothes.

And what better place than George Mason to find the Founder’s Constitution.