Think like a constitutional scholar

If you've ever found yourself in a conversation about the Constitution — a Supreme Court ruling, a presidential power dispute, a free speech controversy — and felt like you were arguing from instinct rather than understanding, this letter is for you.

Most of us were given the Constitution as an artifact: something to reverence, perhaps to memorize in fragments, but rarely to actually read, interrogate, and reason from. Civics class handed us a summary. Cable news hands us a talking point. Neither gives you the intellectual foundation to evaluate what the Constitution actually requires — or permits — in a given moment. That gap is what I built this course to close.

What we do here is what constitutional law schools do in their best moments: we go to the primary sources. We read the Declaration of Independence as a philosophical argument, not a ceremonial document. We reconstruct the Philadelphia Convention as a room full of competing interests, brilliant compromises, and troubling silences. We work through the Federalist Papers — not as historical curiosities, but as the operating commentary of men who had just designed a government and were now defending every choice in public. We read the seven Articles of the Constitution with the question always in front of us: why does it say this, and what did they intend it to do?

I want to be honest with you about what this course demands. It is rigorous. I will ask you questions before I give you answers — because that is how constitutional reasoning actually develops. I will show you where serious, intelligent people disagree, and I will not pretend there is always an easy resolution. What I will give you is a framework: a way of reading a text, tracing its history, applying its principles, and constructing an argument you can defend. That framework is worth far more than any particular conclusion.

And I want to be honest about what this course offers in return. By the time we reach the living document debate, landmark cases, and contemporary controversies, you won't be an observer of constitutional arguments. You'll be a participant in them — one who understands the difference between originalism and living constitutionalism, who can cite Marbury, McCulloch, and Obergefell not as names but as reasoned decisions with histories and implications, and who can pick up a primary source and know what to do with it. That is what it means to have a constitutional mind.

If that kind of intellectual citizenship matters to you — and I believe it does, or you wouldn't be reading this — then I'd like you to join me. The republic, as Franklin reportedly said, is yours to keep. Understanding it is where that keeping begins.