At Balkinization, Jack Balkin interviews Michael and Luke Paulsen on their book The Constitution: An Introduction. In response to the first question — why did you write this book? — Michael Paulsen explains:
The story of how the book came to be is fairly straightforward. I had given a lecture at an institute at Princeton way back in the winter of 2006 — on Lincoln, Presidential Power, and the Emancipation Proclamation (topics eventually addressed in this book!). Following the lecture, at the usual academic dinner, the college profs and law profs began arguing about just how and when their students got such messed up notions about the U.S. Constitution. The law profs blamed the colleges; the college profs blamed the high schools; everybody blamed the shallow media and textbook treatments generally.
I ventured that "somebody" really ought to write a book trying to set forth the essentials of the Constitution — origins, meaning, history, interpretive disputes — in a straightforward, smart, concise, and reader-friendly way that would correct many myths and half-truths. The idea would be to reach generalreaders — students, non-lawyer citizens, journalists,real people — with (hopefully) sound factual information and reasonable analysis, teeing up all the major historical and modern debates in an intelligent way. Such a book could not be superficial and sloppy — it would have to be "smart enough" for academics, even if not aimed merely at academics. But it had to be accessible and readable, too. And it would also have to be fair and not a screaming ideological screed.
Of course, my dinner companions challenged me to write it. I took the idea home to Luke, my then-thirteen-year-old son, who liked the idea. He'd just finished eighth grade Government, and we'd occasionally laugh together at the textbooks that said things like "The Supreme Court invented the idea of 'judicial review' in Marbury v. Madison, which held that the Supreme Court is the supreme interpreter of everything in the Constitution and can determine what it means and change it over time." (The hazards of being a law professors' son, I suppose. I'd like to think that our discussions were part of his early education,and not a bizarre form of child abuse!)
Luke and I decided to take up the idea as a summer vacation project. We underestimated how long it would take — by a factor of about eight years! — but we wrote it almost exclusively during summer breaks, a large part of it at our island cabin in extreme northern Minnesota. Originally, the book might have been aimed at younger students — high-school age or so — but our ambitions and the book's sophistication grew over the years. (Luke went from being a high school freshman to a Princeton Phi Beta Kappa computer scientist, and now a software engineer in Silicon Valley. His legal acumen grew tremendously over this time. He may be one of the most sophisticated lay constitutional interpreters never to have been corrupted by a law school education!)
UPDATE: Here is part 2 of the interview.
Posted at 6:47 AM