For many Americans, “rule of law” can feel abstract — something for lawyers and scholars to ponder, not a force in everyday life. Yet the rule of law, as embodied in decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court, actively shapes everything from individual rights and liberties to the economy, elections, and beyond.
At least, that is one of the key takeaways from a new video series, Rule of Law 101, created by Alexandra Natapoff, the Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law at Harvard. The free, ten-part collection, which launched last month, features world-class legal experts from top law schools around the nation explaining and analyzing important decisions by the Supreme Court. Natapoff calls it “a mini-master class in constitutional law, open to everybody.”
The series, also available on YouTube, covers hot-button topics such as free speech, immigration, corporate regulation, and reproductive rights. The point, Natapoff says, is to reveal how the Court actually handles controversial issues important to our lives, and to foster rigorous conversations about the place of law in our government, economy, and democracy.
“All major civic institutions play a role in maintaining rule of law, but the Supreme Court, for better or for worse, is especially central,” Natapoff says.
“We are living in a time when the relationship between law and power is being severely challenged,” she says. “That has profound consequences for regular people, not just those in the legal profession, not just in law schools, but for millions of Americans.”
The Rule of Law series is just one of a slew of free online learning resources created by Natapoff, which also includes a virtual criminal procedure casebook, Constitutional Rights in Black and White, and a voting rights video casebook, co-created with Guy-Uriel Charles, the Charles Ogletree Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard.
Natapoff says she created the new Rule of Law 101 series with a wide audience in mind, one that includes educators, students, journalists, and advocates. In offering the series free of charge, she hopes to “expand the public conversation about rule of law, how it works, when it doesn’t work so well, and to share the intellectual tools that we have in the legal academy with more people, so they can engage and participate in that conversation themselves.”
Natapoff, who illustrated the videos herself, says she selected faculty contributors who are leading authorities in their fields. Hailing from Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, and more, the scholars each analyze a controversial Supreme Court case important not only for its jurisprudential influence, but for what it reveals about the democratic legal process itself.
“Our experts come from a variety of intellectual backgrounds, and they disagree about many things,” she says. “But they are united in their agreement about the centrality of rule of law for the stability, safety, and integrity of our democracy.”
While Natapoff cautions that the rule of law can mean different things to different people, she says that at the most basic level, it asserts that “democracies govern through law and general public rules, and not through the raw exercise of unchecked power.”
She adds that in building the series, she didn’t always select the most well-known decisions, but rather chose ones that demonstrate how the Court “handles the tricky balance between law and power and change on the ground,” she says.
She also doesn’t shy away from cases many consider wrongly decided — even destructive to the rule of law. “The Court doesn’t always get it right,” Natapoff says. “And you can hear these leading experts grapple with whether it got it right or wrong on some very hotly contested issues.”
After all, it is precisely because people so often disagree that informed debate is essential to a healthy civic society, she says.
“One of the features of meaningful academic and scholarly discourse is that we don’t always agree on how the rule of law should work,” Natapoff says. “I wanted more people to get to hear the richness of the discussion about these profound questions.”
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