William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal
Abstract
The changes wrought by Dobbs and Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) are hardly the only examples of momentous changes to constitutional law in the last few years. Doctrines involving the religion clauses of the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the scope of the president’s removal power, and much more have been changing rapidly since Amy Coney Barrett replaced Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall of 2020, thereby solidifying a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. I imagine that the strengthening of the major questions doctrine, the overruling of Chevron deference to federal administrative agencies, and the potentially imminent revitalization of the nondelegation doctrine present similar challenges for editors of administrative law casebooks.
The question of what to jettison from a casebook when the Supreme Court overrules landmark precedents or otherwise substantially revises extant doctrine cannot be answered without some examination of the purposes of a constitutional law casebook. In fashioning a book that is useful for instructors with a variety of pedagogical styles, one should not be too doctrinaire about what those purposes are, but I do not think it possible to curate the relevant materials without some views about pedagogy. In the balance of this Essay, I’ll lay out what I regard as the goals of a basic course in constitutional law and then turn to how that affects decisions about what cases that are no longer good law to include.
This abstract has been taken from the text of the article.