Constitutional Law -- Is That All There Is?

I got the latest e-mail message notifying me of the contents of the latest issue of Harvard Law Review: Vol. 122 · June 2009 · No. 8. All three headlined articles -- correction, two of the three headlined articles are about constitutional law. (The third paper is not much better: it's an abstract review of an abstract discussion of statutory interpretation.) What's the matter with those people (yes, "those people")? Don't they realize there is more to law than constitutional law (or theories of legal interpretation and reasoning)?

I can understand the impulse to flee courses such as those about the Uniform Commercial Code or bankruptcy; I zealously avoided taking such courses when I was in law school. And I can understand people who find themselves in law school and wondering why they are there. I had similar sentiments when I was a student in law school. But I cannot understand people putatively learned in the law who think that only constitutional law matters.

I rather think that nonconstitutional law -- contracts, environmental law, labor law, corporate and securities law, property law, local government law, and all that -- has a bigger effect on daily life than constitutional law does. In any case, such nonconstitutional legal fields are not unimportant. So suck it up, you law review editors, and decide that if you're in law school, you're going to study all the law that matters -- including, of course, the law of evidence.

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The dynamic evidence page

Coming soon: the law of evidence on Spindle Law