Constitution Day

This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Week Symposium. The author, Jamie Raskin, is a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, and a Lecturer at Yale Law School and a Maryland State Senator.  He co-founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project in 1999 with Professor Steve Wermiel. A Senior Fellow at People for the American Way, Professor Raskin is the author of We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and About America’s Students.  He can be reached at Raskin@wcl.american.edu.

If we don’t expect all romantic love to take place on Valentine’s Day or all gratitude to be expressed on Thanksgiving, why do we expect all public constitutional learning to take place on Constitution Day?   Surely no single day can bear the weight of this important endeavor.

Tea Party activists have shown that constitutional advocacy throughout the year will be heard. The problem with their work is that the public cannot disentangle their constitutional claims from their political agenda. The Tea Partiers’ doctrinaire teachings about the Constitution only work for people who already agree with their politics.

America needs a continuing program of non-partisan education about the nature of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The American Constitution Society keeps lawyers and law students engaged through a program called Constitution in the Classroom. Since 2006, ACS has activated its extensive national network of lawyers and law students to visit high school, middle school and elementary school students and teach them non-dogmatic and non-ideological lessons about the Constitution.

But one of ACS’ key partners in this effort -- the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project -- takes the Constitution directly into America’s high schools on a daily basis throughout the school year, teaching a full-blown course in “constitutional literacy” to young people.

Across the country, from Boston to Baton Rouge to the Bay area, hundreds of law students from 16 different law schools are sharing their passion for the Constitution with students the age of their young brothers and sisters. They wake up early and, with no pay and precious little recognition, spread out to teach thousands of high school students--not once a year, but two or three times every week--before going to classes of their own.

These unsung constitutional champions--law students at eighteen different schools, from American University to Yale--are the Marshall-Brennan Fellows. Launched at AU’s Washington College of Law (WCL) in 1999 with the widows and families of the late Supreme Court Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, the Project is designed not to bewail our nation’s overly-documented civic illiteracy, but to engage young people about what it actually means to be a democratic citizen.  Rather than lamenting that more teens know the names of the Three Stooges or the Backstreet Boys than can name the rights contained in the First Amendment--a favorite Constitution Day pastime of pollsters and drive-by pundits, the Marshall-Brennan Fellows are doing something impressive about it.

This post is part of an ACSblog Constitution Week Symposium. By Martha F. Davis, Professor of Law, Northeastern University School of Law.

The national Constitution is a singular document, but it is not unique. All fifty states of the U.S. and Puerto Rico have their own constitutions, some of which -- through text or interpretation -- stake out approaches that are very different from the federal document. It is worth thinking about the alternative paths that these state documents take, and the possibilities that they raise, as we celebrate and critique the national Constitution on this Constitution Day.

This entry focuses on one area of significant difference between state and federal constitutions: their treatment of economic and social rights.

The national Constitution addresses economic and social rights prominently but with little specificity. The Preamble states that an overriding purpose of the U.S. Constitution is to “promote the general welfare,” indicating that issues such as poverty, housing, food and other economic and social welfare issues facing the citizenry were of central concern to the framers. However, the Bill of Rights has been largely construed to provide procedural mechanisms for fair adjudication of those rights rather than carving out claims on the government to ensure that individuals actually have any social and economic assets to protect. Efforts to convince courts of alternate constitutional interpretations have generally failed. The Supreme Court has ruled, for example, that while the due process clause of the 14th amendment ensures fair processes for welfare recipients, there is no underlying constitutional right to a minimum standard of living. Similarly, the Supreme Court has not found a general right to education derived from the more explicit constitutional guarantees of political participation and equal protection that might be deemed to presuppose an educational baseline.