Last spring, I worked with Berkeley Law’s youth justice program, and had the opportunity to teach a one-hour seminar at a local public high school on the role of the judiciary. I delivered a short lecture to a diverse group of students ages 14-18 on the basic challenges and complexities of constitutional interpretation. Thirty minutes later, the students had taken over the discussion, and they began debating some of the foundational disagreements as to how judges should interpret our founding document.
Similar experiences I have had recently working with young people through Georgetown Law School’s Street Law Clinic have reaffirmed that one need not attend law school, or even college, to appreciate the challenges of constitutional interpretation in a diverse society filled with competing viewpoints and belief systems. But to do so, the public must be willing to set aside personal preferences and join the debate on its own terms; that is, we must be willing to engage in a discussion about the process of interpretation rather than solely focusing on the results themselves.
Serota recognizes that the way we teach constitutional law to students needs to change in order to enable the next generation to fully participate in our Republic.
In order for this initiative to succeed, the focus must be on teaching the public how to think about these problems, rather than what to think about them. A seismic shift in our culture of constitutional debate will not happen overnight, but we must start somewhere, and with time, our public discussion will hopefully evolve into a thoughtful, informative, and useful dialogue that moves America forward.
These are some of the goals we hope to achieve through the Harlan Institute.