In 1936, a young man arrived in the United States capital, Washington D.C., to work for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). By day, he worked at the FBI, and by night, he studied at the George Washington University Law School. In his quest for a simple and clear book on the Constitution, he delved into almost all the works of the Founding Fathers, including “The Federalist Papers” (1788), the notes of the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, and the majority of the correspondence between the prominent Founding Fathers at the time. Eventually, he authored a book on the American Constitution titled “The Five Thousand Year Leap” (1981).
This is the story of the renowned American lawyer and writer Cleon Skousen (1913–2006). Through studying Skousen’s works, as a Chinese-American, I gained an understanding of the American Constitution and its underlying principles, leading me to transition from a software engineer to a journalist to help the public delve deeper into the American Constitution. I was inspired by the founding fathers’ ideologies, leading me to develop an online course to impart the valuable knowledge I acquired to a wide audience.
This course piqued the interest of my first-generation immigrant students, with one businessman deciding to return to law school to formally study the Constitution.
When I asked him what he learned in law school, he said, “Oh, they just teach Supreme Court case rulings.”
I should have felt shocked, but I didn’t, because I knew this situation had been happening for the past hundred years, and I knew the reasons behind it.
After the rise of communism in mid-19th century Europe, its supporters sought to steer America towards communism. However, they faced significant hurdles as the American Constitution effectively thwarted their agenda to expand government power, abolish private property, and redistribute wealth.
In 1884, a group of middle-class intellectuals in the UK established a socialist group named the Fabian Society, after the ancient Roman general Fabius, advocating Fabianism, also known as Fabian Socialism. By 1895, Fabian socialists complained that the British unwritten constitution allowed for continuous modifications, albeit gradual ones. In contrast, the American Constitution did not allow for such modifications. As a result, Britain could gradually move towards socialism almost imperceptibly while our Constitution, being largely individualistic, would require modifications to achieve socialism, with each amendment leading to political crises.
As we know, there is currently no way to amend the American Constitution to align with what socialists desire, as doing so would require overcoming significant constitutional hurdles. Therefore, they chose another path, which involved reinterpreting the Constitution through the courts. This practice originated in the law schools of elite universities in the United States.
Paul Skousen, the son of Cleon Skousen and an expert on the American Constitution, detailed this phenomenon in his book “The Naked Socialist” (2012). In the 1870s, a Harvard Law School professor named Christopher Columbus Langdell became the dean of the law school. He spent twenty years guiding law students towards the path of “casebook study.”
Casebook study forsakes using the thoughts and designs behind the Founding Fathers’ Constitution as the basis for judgment. Instead, it encourages students to learn the long-standing interpretations of the Constitution by Supreme Court justices, interpretations influenced by the justices’ knowledge, experiences, political leanings, and biases.
In 1916, Harvard Law School professor Roscoe Pound became the dean, further advancing legal education by spearheading a movement called “Legal Realism.”
Legal Realism aimed to encourage law students to view the Constitution as a living document, open to interpretation based on the societal needs at that time. In contrast, “Legal Formalism” required the Supreme Court justices to rely on the original intent of the Constitution when making decisions.
Legal Realism allowed future Supreme Court justices or judges who were law school professionals to liberate their thoughts, enabling them to interpret in a flexible manner.
The Supreme Court began to replace Congress as the place to “write” laws, such as in the case of “United States v. Butler” (1936), which removed restrictions on taxation and spending, directly violating Article I, Section 9 of the Constitution. Similarly, in “Everson v. Board of Education” (1947), the school board imposed the establishment clause of the First Amendment on the states, expelling religious education from public schools, infringing upon the Tenth Amendment of the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Since then, the Supreme Court has made rulings on dozens of so-called “landmark cases” that went against the original intent of the Constitution, causing our nation’s great laws to waver over time.
For a considerable time, Roscoe Pound’s initial advocacy for the legal education method led thousands of law students into various levels of American courts to become judges, leading them to believe that if circumstances demanded, they had the authority to create laws. It can be said that the dream of Fabian socialists to change America has come true.
One of the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, a primary drafter of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776), wrote in 1823, “In cases of doubtful interpretation, let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
The late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) was a former law school student who was not swayed by “Legal Realism.” He greatly respected the Constitution and hoped that it would remain undisturbed, stating, “This is not a living document. This is a solid document. … I call it the enduring Constitution.”
If you want to understand why our country has changed so drastically, why the Supreme Court cannot safeguard what we once possessed, this is one of the reasons.
If you want to understand why today’s law school students cannot study the Constitution as Cleon Skousen did in the 1930s, learning directly from the Founding Fathers who created the Constitution, but instead indirectly study the Constitution from Supreme Court justices, now you know why.
(Courtesy of Allen Zeng, a media executive at a Chinese-language public broadcasting network in the United States. He hosts programs on radio, YouTube, and X platform, and holds profound insights into the American Constitution, founding principles, and their relevance in today’s reality.)