On the first day of law school, my constitutional law professor gave the class a homework assignment: go home tonight and read the Constitution. That didn’t take long. Nor that night did the Constitution seem especially complicated, at least compared with the old English cases we were assigned to read in other first-year courses like torts and contracts. … Of course, we spent the ensuing semester — and, for many, the intervening years — trying to fathom the mysteries of what had seemed so straightforward on that first night.

Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and the law. RL