A law professor at the University of Chicago and a former clerk to Justices Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O'Connor, Driver is an unabashed liberal who thinks the American judiciary has failed in not making education a fundamental right. But The Schoolhouse Gate is a valuable volume even for those who do not share Driver's politics. The book is a useful compiling of the school cases that have been the arena for much of our national discussion about religion, free speech, race, and privacy over the past hundred years.

In the 1940 Minersville case, it was Jehovah's Witness elementary students suspended from school for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. In the 1954 Brown case, it was students banned from segregated schools. In the 1969 Tinker case, it was students sent home for wearing anti-Vietnam armbands. In the 1982 Plyler v. Doe, it was children of illegal immigrants refused state schooling under a Texas statute. Always, somehow, our concerns about the clash of public order and individual rights become most pointed when the location is the American schoolhouse.

With seven chapters organized around themes in the jurisprudence, Driver's book consistently reminds us how new much of this is—largely because education belongs to the purview of the individual states and federal jurisprudence requires applying the Constitution to the states, through the mechanism of the Fourteenth Amendment. Driver reminds us as well how close many of these decisions proved. Pierce v. Society of the Sisters and Brown v. Board of Education may have been decided unanimously, but a large number of the cases were decided by 5–4 votes.

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