Teaching the Law School Curriculum - Institute for Law Teaching ...

Constitutional Law 119
The videotape is a terrific supplement to the curfew and relocation cases, with actual footage of the events
in question. Students find it illuminating and their reactions are often palpable.
• Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. This videotape is the progeny of the book of the
same name by journalist Juan Williams. It describes the civil rights movement from the mid-1950s through
the mid-1960s, starting around the time period of Brown v. Board of Education and ending with the time
of the Civil Rights Acts. The six one-hour segments are “Awakenings (1954–1956)”; “Fighting Back
(1957–1962)”; “Ain’t Scared of Your Jails (1960–1961)”; “No Easy Walk (1962–1966)”; “Mississippi: Is This
America? (1962–1966)”; and “Bridge to Freedom (1965)”.
One of the segments, “Fighting Back,” includes the attempt to integrate the all-white high school in Little
Rock, Arkansas, with nine black students. The segment shows actual footage of the frenzied reaction and
intolerance faced by these school children as they went to school.
• Who Can Ever Get Used To This? (Producer: Hope Fair Housing Center, Wheaton, Illinois). This eightminute
videotape describes an incident of housing discrimination personally experienced by Howard University
Law Professor Okianer Christian Dark. The videotape does a terrific job of illuminating the consequences
of discrimination.
• May It Please the Court: 23 Live Recordings of Landmark Cases As Argued before the Supreme Court, Including
the Voices of the Attorneys and Justices, (Edited by Stephanie Guitton and Peter H. Irons, New Press 1993).
These audio tapes provide the actual arguments in many landmark cases, augmenting the opinions and
their rationales. The students benefit from the questions and responses both substantively and from an advocacy
perspective.
Internet Sites Can Make a Web-Based Course
Steven Friedland, Nova Southeastern University Law Center
There are many Internet sites that could be linked together into a web-based course. For example, Philip Kurland’s
and Ralph Lerner’s splendid five-volume anthology — The Founders’ Constitution (1986), which has aptly
been hailed as the Oxford English Dictionary of the American Founding — is now available online at http://presspubs.uchicago.edu/founders/.
The Founders’ Constitution covers the early 17th century to the 1830s and includes
everything from tracts of philosophy to political pamphlets, from public debates to private correspondence. Other
useful Internet sites include University of Texas Tarlton Law Library Guide to Legal History Resources
(http://www.law.utexas.edu/rare/legalhis.htm); University of Oklahoma College of Law Chronology of U.S. Historical
Documents (http://wwwllaw.ou.edu/hist); and Library of Congress Historical Searchable Historical Documents
(http://lcweb2.loc.gov/const/mdbquery.html).
Another comprehensive set of historical documents is the Avalon Project at Yale Law School (http://
www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/avalon.htm), which contains a rich online library of documents related to the
founding and the intellectual history of the Constitution, interlinked to supporting and related documents. Your
students could just point-and-click to read the Articles of Confederation alongside Benjamin Franklin’s draft and
then read what Thomas Jefferson said about the Articles in his autobiography, online at http://www.yale.edu/
lawweb/avalon/artconf.htm. Or they could read Alexander Hamilton’s “Opinion as to the Constitutionality of the
Bank of the United States” (http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/amerdoc/bank-ah.htm) alongside McCulloch v.
Maryland. When these dusty historical documents are digitized and displayed on a computer monitor they might
even seem more “real” to the current generation of students.
Set your Web-browser in motion and you will find numerous sites with excellent general resources. Some of
my favorites include: The Archives (http://www.archives.gov); the Oyez Project (http://www.oyez.org); the National
Constitution Center (http://www.constitutioncenter.org); Legal Information Institute at Cornell Univer-