Does Originalism Profit by the Lack of Advanced Degree Programs in Constitutional History?

I wonder why I see no LLM programs in constitutional law, or even 18th century British constitutional history, on the AALS website. The latter would help contribute to the debate about living constitutionalism versus originalism in American constitutional interpretation. Is your answer that "there is no British constitution"? 

(I should add that I have spoken to three scholars on this subject in the past week or so: James Leonard, professor emeritus at The University of Alabama School of Law; Joel Richard Paul, professor of law at the University of California Hastings [and author of ‘Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times’]; and Mark Wojcik, professor of Anglo-American and Comparative Law at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. I also looked at several books by British legal scholars on ‘the British Constitution’ in 2015, the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta).

Au contraire! according to Walter Bagehot (who inherited ‘The Economist’ from his father-in-law and went on to lead the moderate journal to market saturation)

“There is a great difficulty in the way of a writer who attempts to sketch a living Constitution-a Constitution that is in actual work and power,” wrote Bagehot in his book the English Constitution.

True, some say that the British constitution is different from that of the US in two important ways: first, it is not to be found in one document, but instead is composed of multiple sources, including written texts such as Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628)  and the Bill of Rights (1689).

Text there is to be sure, but critics also say that British Constitution differs from the American one in another way: the former lacks any greater authority than any act of British parliament (which makes sense in that it is a limitation on the monarch, not on the legislature); Parliament doesn’t need anything by way of a super-majority to change the law. 

In fact, it is sometime said that most of the founding documents of what is today a nominal or de facts British democracy have been long ago repealed.

To me, this remark misses the point: what I after is not British jurists today think of the notion of a “living” constitution or a static “original” constitution, but what they would have thought of our contemporary question in 1789.

Furthermore, if the British constitution is easier to change than that of the U.S., as has been argued, that seems to me to suggest that the former would be less static and even more “fluid” and “alive” than the latter.

I would be interested in studying this matter. Does anybody know differently?

And I return to my main point: why is no LLM in constitutional law, or British constitutional history, listed on the AALS website? Would it accomplish too much by way of refuting the notions of originalists currently in vogue?

#AALS

#Originalism

#LivingConstitution