Description:

An award-winning constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago—who clerked for Judge Merrick B. Garland, Justice Stephen Breyer, and Justice Sandra Day O'Connor—offers an engaging, alarming book that aims to vindicate the rights of public school students, so often undermined by the Supreme Court in recent decades.

Judicial decisions assessing the constitutional rights of students in the nation's public schools have consistently generated bitter controversy. From racial segregation to unauthorized immigration, from antiwar protests to compulsory flag salutes, from economic inequality to teacher-led prayer: these are but a few of the cultural anxieties dividing American society that the Supreme Court has addressed in elementary and secondary schools. The Schoolhouse Gate gives a fresh, lucid, and provocative account of the historic legal battles waged over education, and illuminates contemporary disputes that continue to fracture the...