My life has taken several strange twists. I bet yours has had a few.
One such twist in my own life led me to read every decision handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court for 25 years. Let me explain why I did this and what my college students and I learned from it.
Why was this strange for me? Well, growing up, I had never considered becoming a lawyer. We had no lawyers in the family and none of my parents' families or friends were lawyers.
Even majoring in something other than science or engineering had never entered my mind until my senior year in high school. But I became worried that technology — notably the atomic bomb — was already way beyond the ability of the world's governments to cope with. I didn't want to aggravate this problem and decided to major in political science.
Advised by my professors to consider a college teaching career, I abandoned my original intention to go into the foreign service. In graduate school I did include constitutional law as one major field of study, but my main interests were in comparative government, political philosophy, and bureaucratic politics.
Two developments then propelled me toward deciding to read all Supreme Court opinions: I joined the Adrian College faculty, and I married the daughter of the law librarian of the Oregon State Supreme Court.
Adrian College assigned me to teach a course on state and local government, fields in which I had no interest. Except for one graduate course in urban politics, I had never studied them. How could I teach this class in my first year on the job?
My solution was a pair of textbooks containing court decisions involving state and local government. Since I was already familiar with courts thanks to my graduate studies, this gave me a way to approach state and local government.
This approach worked unexpectedly well. It got several of my students interested in becoming lawyers. And it showed me that studying court decisions helps avoid two dangers of studying government and politics.
One danger is seeing the forest but not the trees — wallowing around in high level abstractions but never connecting them with actual people doing actual things. The opposite danger is seeing the trees but not the forest — overloading on specific facts but never seeing how they fit into a larger picture.
Court decisions always involve specific people (the "trees") with conflicting interests but the judges must decide and explain each case on the basis of general laws and precedents (the "forest").
I became enthusiastic about using court decisions in teaching all kinds of political science classes and spent a sabbatical year at Harvard Law School. This helped me understand law and courts much better.
When we returned to Adrian College, my father-in-law got into the act. Drawing on his experience acquiring publications for the Oregon Supreme Court's library, he gifted me a subscription to "U.S. Reports," which prints every decision of the Supreme Court.
These cases were so interesting that I began reading them all. Then I decided my students could profit from reading some of these cases and created a special course, Recent Supreme Court Decisions, which may have been unique among American colleges and universities.
Students read one recent case each week, and we met for one hour to discuss it. It was only a one credit course, so it fit well with most other classes. Students could take it more than once since we used a new set of cases each semester.
Despite their surprising end result, each step from my total lack of interest in law to reading every decision handed down by the Supreme Court made sense. It drives home a point made by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard:
"Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards."
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Author's note: If you would like to try reading a recent Supreme Court opinion, go to https://www.supremecourt.gov and then click on "Opinions," then "Opinions of the Court" and choose a recent year, then one of the cases listed.
Paul F. deLespinasse is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and Computer Science at Adrian College. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1966, and has been a National Merit Scholar, an NDEA Fellow, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a Fellow in Law and Political Science at the Harvard Law School. His college textbook, "Thinking About Politics: American Government in Associational Perspective," was published in 1981. His most recent book is "The Case of the Racist Choir Conductor: Struggling With America's Original Sin." His columns have appeared in newspapers in Michigan, Oregon, and other states. Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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