FACILITY WITH DEMOCRATIC GOVERNANCE

Jon D. Michaels, Constitutional Coup: Privatization's Threat to the American Republic (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Harvard U. Press, 2017):

Facility with democratic governance can't be taken for granted. Justice David Souter, for one, has written and spoken movingly about his early, hands-on experience attending honest-to-goodness New England town meetings as a child. Few of us have been as fortunate to observe real, functioning democracy in action. Instead, we have cobbled together a rudimentary understanding of civil from the brittle pages of high school textbooks, grainy YouTube clips of Schoolhouse Rock!, and the cacophony of talking heads on the Sunday morning news shows. Such limited familiarity is even on display in law schools, where otherwise quite strong students confess never having had occasion before to grapple with the basics of our system of government. This all needs to change, if not for the overall well-being of our society then at least for the instrumental realization of a legitimate administrative state that takes seriously its democratic commitment to public engagement.

Id. at 226. FOOD FOR THOUGHT! This book ought to be on every law student's bookshelve.