Do You Have to Be a Lawyer to Understand the Constitution?

11-30-2012 National:

From The Volokh Conspiracy

Co-blogger Orin Kerr quotes Herbert Hoover’s statement that you don’t have to be a lawyer to understand the Constitution. Interestingly, the Supreme Court agrees. As Justice Owen Roberts put it in a unanimous 1931 decision, “[t]he Constitution was written to be understood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.” This conclusion was reaffirmed by the Court in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

Many parts of the Constitution really are readily accessible to laypeople. You don’t have to be an expert to understand that the Constitution establishes a system of separation of powers rather than a unitary parliamentary system, that it protects freedom of political speech, that it forbids the establishment of an official religion, that it requires the government to compensate property owners when it condemns their land, and so forth. Even when dealing with relatively simple parts of the Constitution, it may be difficult for nonspecialists to go through decades of accumulated legal precedent interpreting these provisions. But the Constitution is not just what the judges say it is, and even the latter is often constrained by the text, especially when the text is relatively clear.

There are, of course, parts of the Constitution that are difficult to grasp without at least some expert guidance. Consider the interpretation of such key constitutional terms as “bill of attainder,” “habeas corpus,” and “privileges and immunities” of American citizenship. But not everyone with relevant expertise on these parts of the Constitution is a lawyer. There are plenty of political scientists, historians, economists and others who are also experts on these subjects, and plenty of lawyers (including many law professors) who have very little specialized expertise on constitutional law.

In sum, there are numerous important parts of the Constitution that are readily accessible to the general public, though sadly many remain ignorant nonetheless. Some more technical aspects require greater expertise to understand. But you don’t have to be a lawyer to be an expert on these subjects, and being a lawyer doesn’t necessarily make you an expert on constitutional law. Just as war is too important to be left to the generals, the Constitution is too important to be left exclusively to the lawyers. ...continued... by Ilya Somin