Federal Judge Says There���s No Value to Law Students Studying Constitution

According to an esteemed federal jurist, law students today should not be wasting any time studying the U.S. Constitution.

That���s right; Judge Richard Posner, who sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, thinks that studying the Constitution should no longer be required because the document is no longer relevant.

Posner���s comments came to light recently by way of an article in Slate. In the piece, he didn���t have much good to say about law schools in America, and included in his list of grievances is the fact that the Constitution is still being studied. On that subject, he wrote the following:

���I see absolutely no value to a judge of spending decades, years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds studying the Constitution, the history of its enactment, its amendments, and its implementation (across the centuries ��� well, just a little more than two centuries, and of course less for many of the amendments). Eighteenth-century guys, however smart, could not foresee the culture, technology, etc., of the 21st century.���

In other words, Posner���s objection to studying the Constitution���and, clearly, to the document itself���is the same one we���ve been hearing for years from judicial activists; that because it was written so long ago, it should be seen as a ���living��� document, and, therefore, obsolete as the preeminent legal guidepost in the United States.

He has since tried to walk back his comments a bit, but no sale; anyone with a brain knows he, like so many other sitting federal judges, are all too happy to see the Constitution go the way of the wind. If he did not feel that way, he would not have carefully and thoughtfully written what he did in the first place.

By Robert G. Yetman, Jr. Editor At Large