Law Schools and Anti-Constitutionalism By Charles Taylor (Florida)
This is a trend that is seen in US university law schools, and from correspondence with Australians, seems to be developing in your country as well. The idea is that the constitution is a document produced by dead white men, and is not relevant for a diverse multicult. This idea first was developed by the Critical Legal Theory school of jurisprudence, that applied postmodernist ideas and arguments to deconstruct law. It had absorbed the Marxist critique, but moved further, being highly relativist, if not nihilist, challenging the validity and legitimacy of legal reasoning. There were many styles of arguments, some borrowing from the philosophy of scepticism that was thousands of years old, going back to ancient Greek philosophy. Other arguments addressed the vagueness of legal concepts, arguing that this led to critical indeterminacies.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/critical_legal_theory
The present case is less philosophical and more aligned with Leftist politics from contemporary issues. It was motivated by the over-ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of the pro-abortion case Roe v Wade. The sentiment is that such a court must never decide anything contrary to Leftist dogma. As the constitution may lead courts to do this, the constitution must go.
In Australia, things are taking a different course with the Voice, where a vague question is being put up, where behind it will be an elaborate reworking of the constitution with a new Chapter IX. Into that we do not know what will go, so if the Voice passes, expect … anything and everything. Don’t let your country end this way!
“In almost every state, law students who pass their state bar examination, which allows them to practice law, take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution.
But the country’s top law schools teach future lawyers and judges the opposite.
Many now teach that the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the nation since its ratification in 1788, is broken and should be
At least that’s what two members of conservative think tanks believe after reviewing courses at the country’s Top 10 law schools, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2022. They examined the teaching at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia universities and others.
Law professors at elite schools are open about their disdain for the U.S. Constitution, the researchers found.
“They’re saying they want to get rid of the Constitution—they’re making no secret about it,” said J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He’s also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center and former DOJ counsel, agreed.
The radicalization of law schools is a threat to freedom not previously encountered in the nation’s history, Mr. von Spakovsky said.
“In fact, some of them are very direct in teaching kids that they need to be revolutionaries, according to these courses that these law school students are taking,” he told The Epoch Times.
Pitching the Ditching of the Constitution
In 2022, Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn—who teach law at Harvard and Yale universities, respectively—wrote a New York Times editorial titled “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed.”
In it, they wrote that the struggle over the Constitution has proven to be a dead end for liberals. They called the founding document “undemocratic” and “inadequate.”
“The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism,” they wrote in the piece.
The writers reasoned that it would be far better if liberal legislators had the power to make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having “to bother with the Constitution.”
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