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Course Overview
This is a 13-week course with two course meetings per week. Throughout this course, we will address the relationship between “the Constitution” as a textual, historical document and “the Constitution” as a system of rules and principles that operate as fundamental American law.
We will be studying the sources, substance, and point of constitutional law in the United States. Our focus will be on Foundations (Part I), Federalism & Separation of Powers (Part II), and Enforcement (Part III). This class is about the U.S. Constitution. But many of the principles and interpretive approaches we will study throughout the semester are also relevant to state constitutional law. This course has broad coverage not only because of the range of topics, but also of the ways we will work through them. We will study not only constitutional doctrine, but also constitutional history and constitutional jurisprudence.
This book, and all H2O books, are Creative Commons licensed for sharing and re-use with the exception of certain excerpts. Any excerpts from the Restatements of the Law, Principles of the Law, and the Model Penal Code are copyright by The American Law Institute. Excerpts are reproduced with permission, not as part of a Creative Commons license.