Legal Legerdemain, Part 1: Airbrushing History . . .

• By Jeffery Ventrella
• Posted Oct 6, 2010
• 1 Comment »

One Fall, I had the privilege of being a guest speaker at two pretty prestigious law schools:  Harvard and Stanford.  To understand my audience better, I asked them how many had had a class in constitutional law. Every student raised a hand. Then, I asked this question:  “How many of you in conjunction with your constitutional law course had been assigned to read The Federalist Papers?”  Every hand quickly went down. To myself, I pondered this: How can we expect the next generation of lawyers to really know about constitutional law unless they understand the context undergirding that precious document? After my presentation, a young student confronted me, telling me that I had asked the wrong question:  “What you should have asked is whether in constitutional law, we had been assigned to read the actual constitution . . . because none of us have.”

This episode typifies what passes for legal education across America; America’s constitutional history has been “air brushed” away. The text of the Constitution is largely ignored; natural law principles, if mentioned at all, are nothing more than punch lines. Instead, a “living constitution” is extolled. And the results are patent: marriage is redefined; babies are aborted, and religious expression is deemed “politically incorrect,” or even “hate speech.”

There is a solution: while ideas have consequences, people change cultures—more precisely, changed people change cultures.  And that is the fundamental mission actuating the Blackstone Legal Fellowship.  By a rigorous curriculum fueled by a top-notch faculty, our country’s best and brightest Christian law students are transformed. They are reconnected to the legal underpinnings of the most free and religiously plural nation the world has ever known. Then they apply that training at law schools across the country and in positions of high influence following graduation.  Blackstone:   true investment in the legal future of the culture.  Ask yourself a question: where is it easier to plant a new church: Santa Rosa, or Saudi Arabia. The legal system makes all the difference.