William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Abstract
Casebooks on constitutional law take a lot of time and effort to prepare. What is the point of bothering to edit one? There are several possible reasons. First, you might want to make money from sales. For the vast majority of law professors, the financial return to the hours spent organizing and editing cases is simply not worth it. Second, you might be the sort of person who just likes to do things by yourself. If you are going through the bother of preparing your own materials, then why not publish them and possibly influence others as well? Most law professors, however, find it easier not to have to reinvent the wheel. Most importantly, you might want to edit a casebook because you want to shape how professors teach the subject and how students learn it.
We can make further progress on the question if we recognize that editing a casebook involves the construction of a canon. In this respect, a constitutional law casebook is a little like the Norton Anthology of Poetry. As time passes, the editors have many difficult decisions about what to include and remove from each successive edition. And these decisions, in turn, will reflect the changing presuppositions and beliefs of the anthology’s editors. But this comparison raises the question of what we mean by the canon in constitutional law as opposed to the canon in, say, Anglophone poetry. In our previous writing on the constitutional canon, we have identified three types of canons at work in constitutional law—the pedagogical canon, the cultural literacy canon, and the academic theory canon. Each of these canons is relevant to the purposes behind editing a constitutional law casebook and to decisions about what to include or exclude.
This abstract has been taken from the authors' introduction and text of the article.