Con Law Read Free

Supreme Court found a right of privacy in the Bill of Rights—’
    Bookheld up an open hand. ‘Does the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—expressly mention a right of privacy?’
    ‘No. But the Court found a right of privacy in the penumbras of the Bill of Rights—’
    ‘
Penumbras?
What, Ms. Garza, is a penumbra?’
    ‘Uh … I’m not really sure.’
    ‘Look it up.’
    While she typed on her laptop, Book sat on the front edge of his desk and surveyed the one hundred freshman students—‘1Ls’ in the vernacular, the first year of their transition from human being to lawyer almost complete—rising before him in the fan-shaped, theater-style seating in Classroom 2.138 at the University of Texas School of Law. They attended his constitutional law class, ‘Con Law’ as it was known in the curriculum catalog, only because it was a required course; they needed the class credit to earn a law degree. These students much preferred studying the nine million words of the tax code and regulations, for their lives would be lived among those words. Those legal dos and don’ts, rules and regulations borne of generous lobbying and conveniently painted in gray rather than black and white, allowed for a lawyer’s creativity.
    Many a legal career had been forged in the gray margins of the law.
    But not his career. He had never been attracted to the words defining capital gains. After one reading of the Constitution—4,543 words; 7,591 including the twenty-seven amendments—back when he was a 1L, he knew his legal life would be lived among the words of James Madison. He had fallen in love with the Constitution at age twenty-two and the affair continued to this day. ‘We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Libertyto ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.’
    How could you not love those words?
    But try though he did—and he did try Monday through Thursday from 9:10 A.M. until 10:00 A.M. —he could not instill the same love for the Constitution in these profit-minded students. If the Constitution had a Facebook page, few of these students would ‘like’ it. Few would follow it on Twitter. Few seemed to even entertain such lofty legal ideals as liberty and justice these days. Those were concepts you read about in the casebooks, not rights you fought for in the real world. They were not the children of the civil rights era; they were the grandchildren. Twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four years old, they had grown up in an era of affluence and entitlement, beneficiaries of the fights fought before they were born. Consequently, they cared more about their job prospects upon graduation, most hoping to become well-paid corporate servants.
    Who else could pay $1,000 an hour?
    And that was the role law schools now played: farm teams for the major league law firms. ‘A’ students were valuable commodities in the law business. They were currency. The schools funneled the best and the brightest to the plush offices on the fiftieth floors of skyscrapers across the nation. In return, the law firms endowed chairs at the law schools, ensuring the curriculum would be shaped to further corporate interests, offering such classes as: Corporations; Corporate Finance; Corporate Governance; Taxation of Corporations and Shareholders; Federal Income Taxation of Corporations; Corporate and Securities Law and Transactions; Corporation Law, Finance, Securities, and Regulation; Mergers and Acquisitions; and, of course, White Collar Crime.
    Even for this millennial generation, a law degree was viewed as their ticket in life. Most, those sons and daughters of the working class, chose law school because their parents had not. Theyborrowed a hundred thousand dollars to finance a legal