"I don't think the Constitution is studied almost anywhere, including law schools. In law schools, what they study is what the court said about the Constitution. They study the opinions. They don't study the Constitution itself"

Robert Bork’s assertion brings to the forefront a longstanding concern about how foundational legal documents are understood in legal education and beyond. He contends that the United States Constitution, the supreme law of the land, is often overlooked as a direct subject of study, even within the very institutions tasked with training future interpreters and shapers of the law: law schools. Rather than delving into the text of the Constitution itself, the educational focus is placed predominantly on judicial opinions, interpretations rendered by judges, particularly those sitting on the Supreme Court.

This approach underscores a significant distinction between primary and secondary sources in legal education. Law students are typically required to analyze countless appellate decisions, dissecting reasoning, precedent, and historical context. The original words of the Constitution, with their deliberate brevity and ambiguity, are often treated as a springboard for centuries of judicial gloss. The result, as Bork suggests, is that the interpretive lens of the judiciary becomes the guidepost, sometimes at the expense of direct engagement with the document’s language and structure.

Such a practice may produce practitioners who are experts in doctrinal analysis but less familiar with or critical of the founding text itself. It raises important questions about Constitutional fidelity and the evolution of constitutional meaning. By prioritizing precedent over the original verbiage, legal education can implicitly endorse a model where the Constitution is a living document shaped not just by amendment but by interpretive accretion, layer upon layer of judicial interpretation.

Bork’s observation implicitly advocates for a pedagogical shift: encouraging law students and scholars to return to the Constitution’s text as a primary source of meaning. This would promote a more direct, perhaps more honest, appraisal of the balance between original intent and modern application. It also implies a critique of legal realism and its consequences, suggesting that the mechanisms by which law evolves may sometimes distance practitioners from the foundational principles that should inform all constitutional interpretation.