Do students today still meaningfully engage with constitutional law and theory beyond treating it as just another mandatory subject? While many students continue to find constitutional law intellectually fascinating, one must ask whether that interest translates into sustained, serious engagement capable of shaping legal discourse.

In an era where career trajectories appear increasingly corporate-oriented, constitutional law risks being reduced to a classroom requirement rather than a lived academic and intellectual pursuit. Are students engaging with constitutional theory outside the syllabus through research, writing, litigation, public law forums, or critical debate? Or has constitutionalism become more symbolic than substantive within law school culture?

The question is not merely about curricular presence, but about intellectual commitment. If law schools are to remain spaces that nurture public reasoning and constitutional imagination, engagement must extend beyond examinations and into scholarship, institutional conversations, and interventions in contemporary debates.

Is that still happening, or are we witnessing a quiet retreat from constitutional discourse within our campuses?

Unless your undergraduate constitutional scholar is the world's next A.V. Dicey, Walter Bagehot, Ivor Jennings, Carol Harlow or Sir David Williams, I don't think we are gonna see anything other than amateurish bilge coming out of any attempt at "[engagement] with constitutional law" through "research, writing". You need to have read constitutional law like crazy first, both at university as an undergraduate and beyond, and done at least a few of the other activities listed in this post, before you can even begin to think of research. And that doesn't include having been rigorously trained in jurisprudence and legal theory at an advanced level, along with advanced training in both qualitative and quantitative research methods, so that you at least have the tools to try and make an original contribution to knowledge through the "[engagement]". Of course, it's great to try and engage with constitutional law through blogs and so on, but even there, you need to read first (blogs like UKCLA and publiclawforeveryone.com are examples that spring to mind at the top of the head) before trying even that yourself. And that doesn't include training in related fields, such as human rights and international law. Are the law schools providing all these? Sanjay Jain, who teaches con law and juris at NLSIU, points out that it is very difficult for him to discriminate between which he loves more - con law or jurisprudence - because of the connections and mixing up in the two fields. Are the students being taught jurisprudence (and con law) in a way that reveals these beautiful connections or not? Those are more hard-hitting questions to ask IMO. Are the law schools maybe encouraging people to go for jobs like research assistant posts at the law commission or judicial clerkships? Are those roles as well represented in a university's career destination report figures as commercial law at firms? What you want to also ask is if the universities have the kind of centres (meaningfully running) like the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism at UCL and events like that centre's Public Law Seminar Series. If so, are students given opportunities to attend? Are they maybe involved in the organisation of those events? And are they involved to some degree at least in the discussions that take place around constitutional law scholarship discussed at those events? You need to start small first, before you get into big things.

With respect, this seems to set up a false choice between Dicey-level scholarship and “amateurish bilge.”

By that logic, no undergraduate should write, publish, litigate, or even publicly reflect until they have completed advanced training in jurisprudence, research methods, comparative constitutional law, human rights, and international law. But constitutional cultures are not built that way.

You don’t produce serious scholars by asking them to remain silent until they are already fully formed.

Of course, deep reading matters. Of course, methodological training matters. Of course, jurisprudence and constitutional law must speak to each other, and I agree that institutions should do far more to cultivate that integration.

But engagement is developmental. It is precisely through attempting to write, argue, critique, and sometimes fail that one acquires intellectual discipline. Reading and writing are not sequential stages; they are mutually reinforcing processes.

If we applied your standard historically, how many young lawyers in India would ever have been “qualified” to intervene in constitutional discourse? Government Law College, Mumbai, did not resemble a modern, methodologically intensive research university when it produced H. M. Seervai. Intellectual seriousness did not wait for perfect institutional conditions.

Your institutional questions, however, are well taken:

- - Are jurisprudence and constitutional law taught in an interconnected way?
- - Are research assistantships, clerkships, and law commission roles meaningfully encouraged?
- - Do public law centres genuinely involve students?
- - Are public law career paths institutionally valorised alongside corporate ones?

Those are structural concerns. But they cut both ways. If students are told their early efforts are presumptively “bilge” unless they are the next Dicey, that itself discourages the very culture of constitutional engagement we claim to want.

The goal is not to prematurely produce the next great theorist. It is to ensure that constitutional reasoning remains an active, living part of law school life, not something deferred until one acquires a PhD and methodological certification.

Seriousness should be demanded. Silence should not.

Thank you for the response. To clarify:

1. Silence is not being demanded.

2. Obviously, engagement is developmental. As I mentioned, students should try writing blogs and things like that. But the way the original question seems to have been framed is as if students are somehow expected to produce the kind of scholarship that can pass peer-review process that happens for an established constitutional journal like ICON, and as if there is some magic way for institutions to get them to do that. I don't think that is possible. The way I see developmental engagement is:

- First, get students to write essays in response to the prompts of others - classroom work.

- Encourage them to then think about gaps in the literature, etc. Come up with a research proposal for a project - the project to be 5000 to maybe 12500 words.

- Write up that proposal into the actual project. At some stage, maybe write up some smaller argument within the project as a blog to see how it is received. Or even do a very small version of the project as a blog and see how that is received.

- Workshop the project with faculty, fellow researchers, etc, to make it publishable quality.

- Repeat cycle (with slight variations, if necessary) for larger-scale projects.

My understanding of the question's wording may have been wrong, but it seemed like the OP wasn't fully appreciating exactly how much hard work would be required for this - it seemed as though they were skipping from step 1 to step 5.

3. The fact that there is one important thing I forgot to include - an institutional question - that may have also caused the impression to take hold in your mind that I am demanding silence until the scholar is a finished product. One of the things that I have experienced at my university is a culture where events known as faculty research seminars take place a few times a term. This is where a member of the faculty presents a project she is currently working on and is questioned by the fellow attendees of the seminar afterwards - postgraduate students and faculty, who ask questions, provide suggestions, etc. My question is, how many universities have such a culture? And even among the universities that do have such a culture, are undergraduate students allowed to attend such events? My university's policies on this are ambiguous: while they don't prohibit undergraduate students from attending the faculty research seminars, it is certainly not something that is advertised to them or that they are encouraged to attend. Why am I emphasizing so much on UG student attendance at such events? The logic is simple. Undergraduate students may often feel like hesitating a bit before engaging with new ideas in legal scholarship - on the basis that the scholar is so much more qualified than them etc, so will have thought about the objections to the arguments that somebody might come up with. If the faculty research seminar norms are like those at my university, where attendees are expected to have read the material the project author will have given to the seminar chair for circulation (usually an abstract and often a paper draft), and would be considered as exceptions if they didn't ask questions, with the difference that undergraduates are expressly welcomed (as long as they are ready to engage), then why? Where are undergraduates being silenced? If anything, they are being supported to thrive!

4. I think people like HM Seervai tended to succeed more despite their institutions, than because of them. Seervai's accomplishments are far more credit to him than to his university. But the vast majority of people aren't going to be becoming great constitutional law scholars in universities that aren't Humboldtian in character. And as for my use of the word "bilge", students need to produce that before producing other stuff - it's a natural step on the progression ladder to great scholarship.

Let me begin by saying that I genuinely appreciate the seriousness of your response. I don’t see this as a disagreement about standards, but about how constitutional cultures are actually built within universities.

I agree that no one should expect undergraduates to move from classroom essays straight to publishing in journals like the International Journal of Constitutional Law. Serious constitutional scholarship is cumulative and iterative. The developmental cycle you outline, essays, research proposals, longer projects, workshops, and refinement, is both realistic and desirable.

Where I would still slightly differ is on what the anxiety originally was about. The concern was not that students must immediately produce a peer-review-ready scholarship. It was whether constitutional engagement meaningfully survives beyond examinations, whether it becomes part of a law school’s lived intellectual culture.

You rightly highlight faculty research seminars as important spaces. I completely agree. But institutional culture is not only about formal permission; it is about active invitation and normalisation. If undergraduates are not explicitly encouraged into those spaces, many will assume they are not meant to inhabit them.

There is also another dimension to this that we should not ignore: student initiative. Many law schools today have societies, clubs, and faculty-led centres dedicated to constitutional law and public policy. The question is not merely whether these exist, but whether students are willing to take ownership of them. Institutional scaffolding matters, but so does student appetite.

For instance, at NLU Delhi, I have recently seen on social media that certain student groups are actively attempting to create a culture of public law discussion, organising talks, engaging with students' writing, and sustaining conversations outside the classroom. These may not yet resemble Humboldtian research ecosystems, but they are attempts at cultural formation. That, in itself, suggests that constitutional engagement is not entirely retreating, while it may simply be uneven and evolving.

On H. M. Seervai: I agree he likely succeeded more because of individual discipline than institutional perfection. But if excellence depends solely on rare individual drive, then constitutional culture remains fragile. The real question is whether institutions and students together can lower the threshold of entry into serious engagement without lowering intellectual standards.

And perhaps that is where we converge:

Rigour must remain non-negotiable. But access to the process of becoming rigorous must not be restricted to the already-formed scholar.

If institutions create spaces and students choose to inhabit them seriously, constitutional discourse does not retreat, but it matures.

This thread explains why most law students end up unemployed and prove to be a burden on taxpayers. Useless AI generated verbose gibberish, which literally no one is interested in. While the world is moving on to edge and physical AI/ robotics, these randos (living off parents) are vociferously debating (on an anonymous online message board) "engagement" with constitutional law 😄