What It Means to Elect a Constitutional Scholar as President of the United States of America

For me, having come from New York University School of Law, my orientation towards the title of "constitutional scholar" is the same as that held by the members of that community.

At the law school, the term "constitutional scholar" was no more remarkable than "electrical engineer." It held a certain prestigiousness, not unlike that of "neuro-surgeon" or "nuclear physicist," because it is one of the most highly-esteemed areas of study and practice.

That said, I am sad to think that the term, "constitutional scholar" would be regarded as somehow romantic. If the study and mastery of constitutional law has come to be regarded in the American consciousness as some kind of quixotic ideal, then it is a testament to how low we have sunk as a republic and how little regard we have come to have for our civil rights and our constitutional principles and aspirations.

We can find the evidence for this intensely regrettable decline in the passage of The Patriot Act, the eavesdropping on American citizens without warrant or probable cause, the avowed American disregard for the Geneva Convention in international warfare as codified by the US Justice Department under Alberto Gonzales, the active practice of torture and physically coercive interrogation techniques, imprisonment in offshore locations without a hearing, the attempt to suspend rights of habeas corpus....

The urgency with which Americans have handed over their civil liberties, hand-over-fist, in the purported interest of security, out of fear, has established a poignant occasion for the restatement of the words of our founding father, Benjamin Franklin:

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I hope that with the election of a constitutional scholar to the United States presidency, that we will see over the next decade the redemption of regard for our constitutional rights and that the title of "constitutional scholar" will be redeemed from trivialization as a merely quixotic ideal. My sincere hope is that the vocation of "constitutional scholar" will at least attain the status of a routine and unremarkable specialization, if not total restoration of the high esteem it once held.