Know exactly what the Constitution says — and what courts have actually decided

If you have ever watched a First Amendment audit video and found yourself unsure who was right — or walked away from a news segment about a Supreme Court ruling wondering what the decision actually said — you are exactly where this school starts.

Constitutional knowledge in America is loud and confident and frequently wrong. The myths are not fringe beliefs held by uninformed people; they are repeated by journalists, politicians, and well-meaning activists who never bothered to read the actual holding of the cases they cite. People invoke Miranda to mean things Miranda does not say. They quote Heller to argue positions Heller explicitly forecloses. They tell you the First Amendment protects them from consequences it has never, in two hundred years of jurisprudence, protected anyone from. This is not a political observation — the misreadings are just as common on the left as on the right, and just as common among people who think they are experts as among people who admit they are guessing.

I built this school because that gap — between what people are certain the Constitution says and what the Supreme Court has actually decided — is one of the most consequential gaps in American civic life. When a person records police in a public space without understanding the public-forum doctrine, or invokes the Fifth without understanding when that right actually attaches, or argues that any gun regulation is automatically unconstitutional after Heller, they are not exercising constitutional knowledge. They are exercising constitutional mythology. My job is to replace the mythology with the real thing: the text, the cases, the holdings, and the analytical frameworks courts actually apply.

What you will get in this school is the same approach I would use with a first-year law student who needs to be deprogrammed of their lay assumptions before they can think clearly about the law. We read the constitutional text carefully — it is shorter and more specific than most people realize. We work through the landmark cases not as names to drop but as holdings to understand, with equal attention to what the Court held and what it conspicuously did not hold. We apply the scrutiny frameworks so that the next time you hear "that law is unconstitutional," you have the tools to assess whether that claim would survive contact with an actual court. And throughout, I will point out — with as much precision as I can and as much dry humor as the subject allows — exactly where the most popular constitutional myths break down under scrutiny.

This is not a course about politics. It is a course about law. The Bill of Rights has been interpreted by courts, and those interpretations are what govern your life. Come learn what they actually say.