Current Programs
Marshall-Brennan Project: A Message from the Founder
Consider four seemingly intractable and unrelated social problems. High school students are not learning about our Constitution or how to become effective citizens and, at the same time, their schools are drifting away from basic constitutional values like free expression and due process; law students enter law school with great commitment to justice but find scarce opportunities to express their intelligence and idealism; public schools in many big cities are cut off from universities; and society has a rhetorical commitment to "diversity" but few ways in which people from different backgrounds and communities interact in a meaningful and sustained way.
At the Marshall-Brennan Fellowship Program at American University's Washington College of Law, we have found one small way to confront all of these problems. Operating in the spirit of the late great Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, whose widows helped launch this project, the program sends gifted upper-level law students into public high schools four or five days a week to teach high school students a new course in constitutional and civic literacy. The curriculum hits them right where they live: the heart of it is 35 Supreme Court cases which concern the rights and responsibilities of public school students. Each case raises profound issues about the tension between the requirements of community and the rights of the individual as well as what it means to have a system of public education in a democratic society.
The Marshall-Brennan Fellows do no pretend that their work is a panacea for all of society's ills, but all experience a growing sense that their hard work makes a critical difference in the education and character formation of the young Americans who are entrusted to them as students. There is magic and hope in some of these stories and I hope you will find both in the pages that follow.
Jamin Raskin
Professor of Law and Director of Law and Government Program
Washington College of Law at American University