National League of Cities and the Ephemeral Nature of Significant Supreme Court Cases

Abstract

For many years, I taught third-year law students at the Dickinson School of Law (Penn State's law school now, a private institution then) a seminar entitled “The Constitution.” For a semester we would seek to get to know the document through a careful reading of it, along with some of the works that those who wrote the Constitution would have read and some that they wrote, various essays by legal scholars and political scientists, and various Supreme Court cases. The goal was to get these budding young attorneys to try to determine what, if any, relationship there might be between what the Constitution says and what we now say it says.