School: Textbook formatting and ConLaw musings...

(the above is one of Oleg Volk's great photos, obviously)

I never really wrote in my textbooks until I started attending law school. In most engineering classes, the books were already pared down to the essentials - formulas, examples, problems. Law school casebooks, on the other hand, often have lots of extraneous material that can hamper your understanding of the material. That's why most law students underline and highlight in their textbooks. I like to note what the reasoning of the court is when deciding a case - I draw a big box around the relevant reasoning and mark it with my pen.

Some books are better than others for this. In my experience, the formatting used by Aspen Publishers is terrible for law school work - the margins are thin, the paper is often translucent, and the headings and page divisions are easy to overlook. My favorite book so far, in contrast, is Contracts, Sixth Edition, by Farnsworth and co., and published by Foundation Press. It has brilliant white paper, big margins, and even the (extremely) rare illustration.

My Constitutional Law book (Stone, Seidman, et al) is, alas, an Aspen book. Naturally it includes Roe v. Wade, perhaps the most controversial Supreme Court opinion of the last half of the 20th century. Unlike previous controversial rulings like Brown v. Board of Education, however, Roe has precious little explicit support in the Constitution for its holding; instead, it infers that the privacy rights in the Bill of Rights by extension apply to abortion, taking pre-viability abortion out of the political debate altogether.

This might be defensible, I suppose (the people do have unenumerated rights, which may or may not include abortion) except for the curious issue of the right to keep and bear arms. I wonder how the Court (and all the lower courts) can infer a substantive due process right from a hotchpotch of different amendments, but remain silent about a right that is expressly protected in the Bill of Rights. Even under the specious "collective right" argument the gun control crowd like to bandy about, doesn't a collective right infer a "penumbra" that implies the majority of gun control is unconstitutional? In other words, how can abortions be legal in Chicago and not handguns? Which is more fundamental to the concept of ordered liberty - an armed populace or abortion? I'm not pro-life per se, of course, but these are questions that have dogged me since I started highlighting stuff in Roe. The box I drew around the reasoning there left me unsatisfied.