A number of you have confided in me, in various words, that you "don't know what is going on" in our class. When I have pressed, the point has become a bit more specific: many of you are unclear what you are supposed to be extracting from the material as we cover it. When pressed further, it has become yet more specific: many of you are unclear what you are supposed to be extracting from the material for purposes of the final exam.
This -- I want to make clear -- is a completely legitimate concern. Unlike some professors, I'm not bothered when students ask about the exam, or try to pin down more concretely my expectations. I understand that grades are important to many of you (though I think students tend to overestimate their real-world significance), and I think it is very important that I be as transparent as possible about how you will be evaluated. So this is all completely fair game.
But I should also say that my objectives for the class are broader than the types of things that are amenable to law school examinations. Broadly speaking, I have three pedagogical goals: (1) to convey a basic grounding in the fundamental tenets of constitutional law, useful to all lawyers in their practice, and in taking the bar exam; (2) to instill an understanding and critical awareness of constitutional law in its broader outlines, not simply in its blackletter rules, useful to you as future guardians of the legal profession; and (3) a still broader sense of constitutional history and politics, and the means of constitutional change, that I hope will be useful to you as well-educated citizens in our constitutional democracy.
In the first few weeks of the course, as we are establishing a framework for the material, goals (2) and (3) have received more emphasis than goal (1). As a result, there have been fewer "rules" that might be analogous to those you have studied in other classes. And this may be causing some of the uneasiness. As the semester progresses, goal (1) will increase in prominence, though I must admit, the nature of constitutional law is that such "rules" are rarely ever clear, and they are rarely more certain than the ideological leaning of the present Supreme Court.
I should also confess, though, that although goal (1) is the easiest to test, I think it is ultimately the least important of the three. Law school is obviously much more than bar prep; if it were not, you would be wasting a great deal of money on tuition. (Perhaps you feel that regardless.) What I hope a well-rounded legal education provides is a deeper level of comprehension and understanding, a way to contextualize and organize all the minutiae of legal rules that you will master through the course of your career.
Mind you, goal (1) is still quite important. But it is only one part of what I hope is going on in our class.
I'm not sure whether this actually allays any concerns. But it might at least help you understand where I am coming from, and why I have emphasized certain aspects of the material thus far.