I'll love you in the morning / when you're still hungover

In the cold light of day, I can see the draft syllabus I posted yesterday has quite a lot of new stuff, and not very much in the way of classic articles / books. Too much, probably: one thing a student would completely miss from this syllabus is any serious engagement with the history of constitutional thought. There are a couple of reasons for that. The first is that I think, especially with graduate students and a broad topic like this, there's value in diving right into current controversies and contemporary statements of the issues. You lose some sense of the history, yes, but you also get up-to-date bibliographies and a better feel for how the problem is currently framed. Basically: it's not an history of political thought class, and if you want that thing, I'm not the guy for you.

But there's also a strong bias in the syllabus for on-line articles. Part of this can be defended on ideological/altruistic lines: I'm bothered by the course-pack licensing-fee racket. But it's more than that. As someone who is both lazy and only started getting into this stuff in the last, oh, five years or so, my own knowledge is heavily channeled towards on-line sources: journals my institution only has in print almost don't exist for me. This cuts the other way, too--though Solum's Legal Theory blog, I end up reading a lot of articles that would never get on my radar screen otherwise, including a number of bad ones.

Anyhow. It's a real issue.