Last week, Pantheon published my new book, "The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind." The volume examines the intersection of two distinctively American institutions: the Supreme Court and the public school. In this first of five items that I will post this week, I begin by explaining how my book challenges the received wisdom among legal academics about the Supreme Court's role in American society. Unlike many law professors today, I claim that the Supreme Court has demonstrated an underappreciated capacity for shaping the nation—a dynamic that comes into sharp focus when examining constitutional law through the prism of public schools.

To claim that the Supreme Court has meaningfully advanced the causes of constitutional liberty and constitutional equality in public schools would once have been wholly unremarkable. Such a claim would simply apply to the discrete field of education law what constitutional scholars assumed was accurate as a general proposition. During an earlier era, legal academics frequently asserted—without marshaling any real evidence—that the Court had transformed the nation on a wide array of topics by extending constitutional protection to disfavored groups and causes.

More recently, however, several distinguished scholars have challenged that assessment, contending that the Court was hardly the mighty institution that older professors maintained as an article of faith. Upon examination, these revisionist scholars insist, the Court's salient decisions almost invariably ratified (rather than resisted) public opinion, and should be viewed as the reflection of national consensus or the anticipation of an emerging national consensus. This revisionist band of scholars observed that the Court's decisions invalidating measures often did not challenge the legislative landscape across the country, as the prior generation had believed, but instead typically tackled practices found in a handful of states—which they labeled "outliers." While this revisionism might have begun as a relatively small intellectual movement, its views have now become dominant within legal academia, and gained purchase in popular circles as well.

But scrutinizing the broad jurisprudence involving students' constitutional rights complicates this revisionist school's unduly frail conception of the judicial capacity for shaping American society. Indeed, if constitutional professors from earlier times were wrong to believe that the institution could achieve almost anything, today's revisionist legal scholars are incorrect to suggest that it can accomplish virtually nothing.

Read more at The Volokh Conspiracy