All of Sean McAneny's Comments + Replies
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Thanks for the guidance. I suppose I am interested in the boring parts of the constitution and would welcome any suggestions on where to start. As for methodology, can you offer any advice on how to set out on a course of self-study for someone not attending school? (i.e. What are your habits for teaching yourself new material? Do you simply read, or do you annotate? How do you reinforce what you learn without external forces like examination? What does your scheme of work look like?)
6[anonymous]
Interesting. Okay, for treatises none of these particularly stand out (https://guides.library.harvard.edu/c.php?g=309841&p=2076807) but you should find a treatise or hornbook on the subject. You should realize that these treatises, like any treatise but perhaps especially in this area, are written by people with a vision of how the constitution works that you may or may not agree with but which is in any event essentially polemic, even with the boring bits. Engage with the underlying argument and try to pick it apart. Whose ox?
The primary component of the law school experience you will be missing is the experience of standing in the middle of a room full of people and having your professor say, “Okay, sure. Now argue the other side.”
Read Marbury v. Madison. Why do people go on and on about this case? Read Wickard v. Filburn. Read tons of leading cases, focusing on the question of what the case says about the ultimate issue of how authority is distributed and exercised in government. Learn to look at Brown v. Board of Education, for example, through this lens; assuming segregated education is not just bad but unconstitutional, whatever that means, what is the Court supposed to do about it, and why is a federal court the right venue for this discussion?
I’ll also take back what I said about Lincoln in this context and say go ahead and read The Federalist Papers and, of course, the constitution itself, as amended. Go ahead and read Blackstone, and Story on Equity, etc etc. Try to read this material on its own terms, though. This stuff has been heavily polemicized, but the source material is rich and strange and also very human.
As to how, well, set yourself a systematic course of reading and try to find a way of writing about it, if only for yourself. Books on legal writing might actually be of use to you. To supplement that, I’d mainly advise that you try and find a real live lawyer to talk to, if only as a sanity check.
The constitutional law world is full of
Great post; I will be following along! I appreciate both the lucidity of your explanation and the Johnsonian prose which is something I only ever dream of producing myself. In your opinion, what are some negative externalities that are NOT widely agreed upon? I would offer industrial-scale meat production and consumption and maybe excess incarceration (especially along the lines of drug criminalization).