Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2013
Journal
Denver University Law Review
Volume
90
Issue
4
Abstract
The Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project is the leading effort in American legal education to mobilize law students to teach high school students about the Constitution and Bill of Rights. This Article traces the development of the project from its beginnings in the 1990s at American University Washington College of Law to its unexpected but dramatic expansion across the country to eighteen law schools today. The Article explains the Marshall-Brennan curriculum, which focuses on Supreme Court decisions addressing the rights of America's student population in school and in the criminal justice process, and canvasses the essential operational ingredients of Marshall-Brennan chapters thriving all over America. It argues that this project provides functional meaning to the intellectual movement in constitutional law to define a democratic or popular constitutionalism, offering law schools and their students and professors an excellent, practical way to promote constitutional values in their local communities. It further posits that the project offers one compelling answer to the growing cynicism about law schools, which are being vilified for being internally exploitative, socially useless, intellectually self-referential, and indifferent to the community. Finally, the Article contends that, in the post-Fisher v. University of Texas age of sharply controlled affirmative action, the project is the most effective pipeline strategy in the land for making a law school education a tangible choice and viable prospect for talented and disadvantaged high school students from all backgrounds.
Recommended Citation
Jamin B. Raskin,
The Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project: American Legal Education's Ambitious Experiment in Democratic Constitutionalism,
90
Denver University Law Review
(2013).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/1045