Declaration of present incompetence -- I last taught a con law course in 1994.
Sandy writes: "One has a choice, I believe: To teach a course on whether one can really take the enterprise of constitutional interpretation seriously or a course on the institutional role (and behavior) of the United States Supreme Court. The latter is not without value, but I think the former is far more important." Would one really want to teach about "the enterprise of constitutional interpretation" without considering what persons or institutions were doing the interpreting, in what contexts, and to what ends? It would seem to me that a course in the subject for law students should focus on constitutional interpretation in some context where it is likely to make a practical difference, and then with appropriate attention to the institutional setting. Study of executive constitutional interpretation, if that's thought desirable, should consider the Pres/Atty-Gen relation, and Office of Legal Counsel etc. Talk about legislative constitutional debate shouldn't just posit the Conscientious Legislator alone with conscience and Oath, but ask how it might be institutionalized and how that might affect substance -- the Vermeule/Garrett article offers some suggestions, as I recall. I do teach torts, and I'd be resistant to teaching it to law students as a pure exercise in applied corrective justice, without a focus on the institutional context -- judge-made law and common-law tradition, judge/jury relations at trial, the insurance surround, and so on. The point isn't practical in the vocational sense -- only a few more will be personal injury lawyers than will practice constitutional law -- but rather the Realist point that students should learn to attend to consequences, hence to institutions and their procedures and practices, as essential to the intelligent lawyerly understanding of any body of substantive law. Judicial review is where constitutional law has by far its most serious institutional clout in our system, and where it becomes most consequential, isn't it? I would have supposed that the instituting of serious judicial review in Canada with the adoption of the Charter in 1982 should have completely transformed the teaching of constitutional law as a subject in Canadian law schools, and made the subject into a much more important one than it previously had been. It does seem readily understandable on simple political grounds that many constitutional law professors of liberal bent have taken such an interest in the constitution-outside-the-courts" in recent years. I recall plugging the separation of What the Constitution Requires from What the Judges Say as a strategy for liberals myself, some years back. But I don't think this reductionist explanation applies in Sandy's case. I recommend to one and all Jack Balkin's wonderful essay on Sandy's work (available on SSRN). Sandy's approach to constitutional law is to a considerable degree "faith-based," and it's the paradoxical interaction of that faith with his political scientist side that makes his work always so interesting. Personally, I think I quit teaching the subject because I never found a comfortable classroom balance of its sacred and profane aspects. Tom Grey Stanford Law School [EMAIL PROTECTED]
