Check it Out: Driver on Public Education, Con Law, and the American Mind

Check out Justin Driver's (U. Chicago) expansive, meticulous, and engrossing new book, The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind. The title speaks for itself, but here's from the intro:

At its core, this book argues that the public school has served as the single most significant site of constitutional interpretation within the nation's history. No other arena of constitutional decisionmaking--not churches, not hotels, not hospitals, not restaurants, not police stations, not military bases, not automobiles, not even homes--comes close to matching the cultural import of the Supreme Court's jurisprudence governing public schools.

That's because of "the importance of that venue for shaping attitudes toward the nation's governing document." Still, "[i]n recent decades . . . such sentiments appear more often in the Court's dissenting opinions than in its majority opinions."

Driver tells us what to do about that.