Welcome to Level Two!
Hello and welcome to Level Two of Constitutional Perspectives!
As I said in the introduction to the entire series, the concept for Constitutional Perspectives is a series of levels, each covering the same territory (roughly, the whole of constitutional law) but in increasing depth. Level One, which was meant to be an introduction to the American constitutional system assuming zero prior familiarity, wrapped up in late December, so now it is time, as it were, to take things to the next level. Level Two is meant to be pitched more at the level of an undergraduate or law school intro course in constitutional law. (Those are equivalent: the difference is typically that the law school course covers in one semester what the undergraduate course would do in two.)
This entails a number of differences from Level One. Previously, each lesson has been relatively self-contained, covering a whole topic – like "federalism" or "checks and balances" – in one go. Level Two, instead, will be divided into modules, each several lessons long and each organized around a particular topic. These will be what I think of as the "Big Questions" of constitutional law. So far, in Level One, I haven't really been asking questions, let alone answering them. I was, rather, surveying the features of the Constitution that are not in question – what Professor Sandy Levinson calls the "Constitution of Settlement," as opposed to the "Constitution of Contestation." We're getting into the latter, now, although many of the questions I'll be covering have not been seriously contested for centuries. They're still essential to getting from the 4500 words of the constitutional text to the constitutional republic we inhabit.
Relatedly, here in Level Two I will be engaging with, and making, legal arguments. The questions I will be asking do not have immediate, self-evident answers; rather, we answer them through argumentation, through appeal to the various sources of legal authority that the Constitution gives us. In other words, through the use of the modalities of constitutional argument. You should go read my primer on the modalities, if you haven't already. I will also be doing a module, probably toward the end of Level Two, on constitutional theory, which will explore each of the forms of argument in greater depth.
Because of this greater depth, I expect that each lesson here in Level Two is likely to be rather longer than they were in Level One. So far I've been trying to keep each piece to about 2000-2500 words, and have been splitting topics that seemed to run much beyond that. The lesson on constitutional prehistory with which I have chosen to begin Level Two, on the other hand, is some 4500 words long. And while that will probably be toward the extreme end of the spectrum, nor neither will I make a concerted effort to avoid pieces running to three or even four thousand words if they seem to need it.
I said in announcing the project that Level Two would be limited to paid subscribers, and for now at least I am going to stick to that decision.
Thanks for reading!
