Story thread · 2 reports / 2 sources

The Supreme Court’s two decades of constitutional change

scotusblog.com · 7h · first reportShare

This series for SCOTUSBlog will recount two decades of constitutional change through the five editions of our casebook, the first published in 2008 and the latest to be published this December. Lawyers tend to internalize the constitutional law that existed when they attended law school. Consider a lawyer who took the course in the spring of 2005, a few months before the Rehnquist court adjourned for the last time. That lawyer learned that the Constitution protected a right to abortion, that a university could consider an applicant’s race to assemble a diverse class, that courts identified an establishment of religion by applying what is known as the Lemon test, and that Congress could protect the members of an independent agency like the Federal Trade Commission from removal by the president. None of these four propositions accurately state the law today. That lawyer probably also learned nothing about the Second Amendment, which the court had not interpreted since United States v. Mi