Problems of Democracy

[groovedaddy]

On the first day of law school, my constitutional law professor gave the class a homework assignment: go home tonight and read the Constitution.

That didn’t take long. Nor that night did the Constitution seem especially complicated, at least compared with the old English cases we were assigned to read in other first-year courses like torts and contracts. Even students who, like me, didn’t know a tort from a contract had been exposed in college and earlier to some formal learning about the Constitution.

My own first exposure came in a high school class known as Problems of Democracy — on reflection, a rather daring name for mid-century cold-war America, with the implicit suggestion that democracy might have problems, might not be perfect. Search the Internet for a course by that name, and you will find that it was a popular part of the country’s civics curriculum into the 1980’s — in the days when there was a civics curriculum. (By the time my daughter was in high school, civics was still required, but it went under the less redolent name of National, State and Local Government — what did they mean, anyway, by listing “national” in front of state and local?)

Did Problems of Democracy also mean to imply that the Constitution itself might not be perfect in every way? If so, that particular message didn’t come through in my public school classroom. If there were problems, Chief Justice Earl Warren was undoubtedly fixing them.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/12/problems-of-democracy/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

[Drale]

1. You mean the constitution isn't perfect

and was written so it could be changed when there was a need? MY WHOLE LIKE VIEW IS SHAKEN!! :sarcasm: