A Casebook for the Dean’s Reading List: Holland, McAllister, Shaman & Sutton, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience

Abstract

Perhaps this Article will prompt you to obtain a professor’s review copy of its subject—the new casebook, State Constitutional Law: The Modern Experience—and present it to the dean or academic dean of your law college. If you share my distress about the comparative silence of law schools and bar examiners in response to the contemporary callings to teach and test state constitutional law, consider also attaching a copy of co-author and Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton’s article, Why Teach—and Why Study—State Constitutional Law, or flagging retired Delaware Supreme Court Chief Justice E. Norman Veasey’s Foreword to The Modern Experience, which culminates in a reprint of the July 2010 Conference of Chief Justices Resolution regarding State Constitutional Law Courses. For too long, the American legal educational system has ignored the importance of state constitutions to our legal and political systems. Scholarly commentary from United States Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr. and Oregon Supreme Court Justice Hans A. Linde in the late 1970s and early 1980s raised attention to the dormancy of state constitutional law and seemingly led to the development of the first and, until now, only employed casebook on the subject. Although that