The canon of constitutional law for undergraduate teaching: the melding of constitutional theory, law and interpretive empirical political science.

As a teacher of undergraduates, I want to make the argument that courses in American Constitutional Law should emphasize a wide range of topics, including constitutional theory, the process of Supreme Court decision-making, and how the Supreme Court brings change in political, economic, and social life into constitutional law. We should also present students with some of the methods of analysis and definitions of institutions and institutional change that inform the emerging historical institutional or politics and history approach to American political development. I have written elsewhere about the importance of teaching constitutional theory and the process of social construction by the Supreme Court as ways to bring the outside world into supreme Court decision-making. The following eight paragraphs are taken from that article, which may be hard for readers of this journal to locate.(1)

Intellectual movements, such as Feminist Theory, Critical Legal Studies, and Critical Race Theory, are central to understanding how political and social change is facilitated through law. Students want to know how change in constitutional law occurs and how such changes inform the process of change in the wider society. The link between such intellectual movements and legal change requires a consideration of the role of the interpretive comm...

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