Constitution and Supreme Court Talk: Not Just for Lawyers Anymore!

In front of the Supreme Court on 3/28/12

What an exciting week it has been for Constitution-lovers! Every time I turn on the radio or TV or look at Facebook, so many people, "average Joes" included, are talking about the different Supreme Court Justices and using words like "severability" and "enumerated powers" and might even throw in an old court case name like "Wickard v. Filburn." Suddenly the American people are paying as much attention to the judicial branch as to the elected branches!

This is such a positive change from twelve years ago, when my interest in the Constitution prompted me to start applying to law schools, since virtually no one outside of the legal profession was talking about these issues back then.

Few people know that my undergrad degree was in English Secondary Education. I never thought about law school back then, though I did love following conservative political news, and had a keen interest in education policy. After graduating I ended up working for organizations providing school choice through private charity, but I still had a hankering for teaching. So when I saw a call for volunteer English as a Second Language teachers in my church bulletin, I signed up.

I was assigned to teach a citizenship test preparation class. When I got started, I was distressed to see the students were just going through worksheets to memorize the answers to 100 possible questions such as "what are the colors of the flag?" or "when is Independence Day?" or if the examiner wanted to get tough "which President signed the Emancipation Proclamation?" No one was explaining what the questions or answers really meant. Call me crazy, but I think voters--and these students would soon earn the right to vote--ought to understand the basics of our form of government. So I started developing my own curriculum for the class.

In early 2000, I started a unit on the Bill of Rights amendments to the Constitution. As I prepared my materials and taught the students, I kept noticing that the plain words of the Constitution didn't seem to match up with the way the government actually worked in the present. Why was that? How did the government justify what it was doing under the Constitution? Was there any hope of moving back toward the original intent? I was hungry for answers, and found the only folks who were talking about these things were lawyers, particularly those associated with The Federalist Society.

At the time I was also considering the next step in my career path, and decided going to law school would not only allow me to study these questions, but also open new doors of opportunity. I chose the University of Virginia School of Law because its faculty represented a diversity of legal philosophies, including some leading originalist (as in original intent of the Constitution) scholars like John Harrison, who served in the Reagan Administration, and Lillian BeVier, a highly respected conservative expert on the First Amendment.

The Federalist Society provided me with ample opportunities, in addition to some of my classes, to deepen my knowledge of Constitutional law. In my second year I joined the UVA chapter leadership and interned at the national headquarters in DC once a week. In my third year I served as chapter President and focused on growing our membership through an excellent program of events and guest speakers, and specific outreach to women, many of whom I found to be "quietly conservative." Through the UVA Federalist Society, I had the opportunity to meet and talk with Justices Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and the late Chief Justice Rehnquist. When I interned with a law firm one summer, I also had the privilege of proofing and editing the joint brief of the Republican and Libertarian political parties challenging the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law before the Supreme Court. (Unfortunately, former Justice O'Connor woke up on the unconstitutional side of bed when that case was decided.)

It was all so interesting and important, yet as soon as I stepped outside of the legal clique, virtually no one knew what on earth I was talking about. That finally started to change after Obama was elected. I give the tea party movement a ton of credit for bringing the Constitution and Supreme Court to widespread public attention.

I think it is making a difference! The Supreme Court Justices rightly are not elected and can't be lobbied like the elected branches, but I think they are subtly influenced by what people are saying in the public square. If the only people talking about them are legal academics and lawyers, then most of the talk will be from liberals, and the Justices will find it hard to swim against that tide. But with so many Americans talking now about the Constitution and Supreme Court from the perspective of original intent and preserving individual liberty, it makes it much easier for Justices like Anthony Kennedy to say things like "here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases, and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in a very fundamental way."

So to all lovers of the constitution, whether you have a Juris Doctor or not, I say "let's keep up the great work!"