More thoughts on why many lawyers don’t understand the Constitution, from Jen Rubin:

…law schools have given way to the notion that the Constitution is whatever the Supreme Court says it is. In a sense this is true insofar as the principle of judicial review has been concretized and the other branches assent to the courts’ decisions. But the idea that the Constitution has objective meaning that can be ascertained, in part by studying works like “The Federalist,” is still resisted by the vast majority of elite law school faculty. Even weirder from faculty members’ vantage point is the idea that you can thereby assess whether the Supreme Court got a case “right” or “wrong.” That sort of assessment, using the Constitution, its text and its meaning as the touchstone for judicial interpretation is not in fashion, and hasn’t been for decades now, at elite law schools. Students study precedent and view newer decisions as either departures from or natural consequences of earlier cases. But assess that a decision, and maybe a great number before that, are just plain wrong because they misunderstood an aspect of the Framers’ intent or the structure of the Constitution? Perish the thought.

This is why so many “progressive” lawyers (including Barack Obama) have made such fools of themselves in front of a Supreme Court that actually does understand, and care about it, and why so many legal analysts in the media have been so shocked that the court actually takes constitutional arguments seriously.