It’s Constitution Day, or technically Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, because it’s a holiday so nice Congress named it twice. And Congress doesn’t mess around with this event: by law, all publicly funded educational institutions and all federal agencies must provide educational programming on the history of the American Constitution today. So if you see someone dressed up as a Founder today, they’re probably a teacher. Or an incompetent lawyer.
In the spirit of teaching constitutional law, and generally making learning fun, I wanted to focus on the professorial stylings of Professor Josh Blackman. A couple weeks ago, I noticed Professor Josh Blackman tweeting out memes he’d created to describe Youngstown v. Sawyer. If you can inspire a chuckle (or frankly anything) over seizing steel mills, then you’ve accomplished something. He told me that he often employs memes to hammer home his lessons. And when you think about it, memes are the perfect medium for teaching constitutional jurisprudence: you take something established and scribble new stuff all over it.
Let’s look at some of his work. Maybe readers can come up with some other clever entries….
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First the two that started it all:
10 points to Gryffindor on finding the perfect Truman picture. I’d love to know the context. Probably something to do with “comparing notes” with MacArthur.
Soon after these hit Twitter, another Twitter user, lawyer Brendan Kenny, posted some follow-ups based on classic meme templates. The Mordor:
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And All Your Base:
Nice.
Professor Blackman’s rules for memes require the underlying image to include either a party to the case or a jurist who decided the case. Fair enough. But, even the good professor doesn’t follow those rules all the time. Maybe it’s just because this was about the New Jersey Supreme Court, but when Professor Blackman taught about easements:
What do you think of Professor Blackman’s rules? I think they’re a bit constricting. I’d welcome just a string of Alito quotes on the Scumbag Steve picture. Or this meme that I call “Simpler Scalia”:
Basically, I feel Professor Blackman’s rules shouldn’t be absolute, but rather… a higher degree of difficulty. Maybe, to borrow a bit from Madden, that’s working on the “All-Marshall” level.
Speaking of Justice Marshall, here was my attempt to include an image of someone involved in the case, in this case William “Starbury” Marbury:
Anyway, join in the fun. It’s an entertaining diversion from your daily grind.