We the People, Explained: A Love Letter to Law School in America’s 250th Year

As America marks its 250th year, Dean Brandy Price reflects on the education that transformed her understanding of the Constitution, citizenship, and the enduring responsibility to defend the rule of law.

BY BRANDY PRICE

America turns 250 this year, and everyone who has ever entertained even the faintest thought of law school should consider attending.

For the past several decades, bedrock constitutional principles—checks and balances, separation of powers, federalism—have become increasingly vulnerable to the expansion of executive authority under administrations led by both major political parties.

This is not an essay about politics.

Rather, this is a love letter to law school, that singular and splendid place where words suddenly weigh more than monuments and a room full of stubbornly curious students can spend an hour arguing over the placement of a comma because the placement changes everything.

It is a place of casebooks and cold coffee, and conversations that spill onto sidewalks. A place where ideas arrive the way fireflies so often do. One at first, then another, then another, until suddenly the opaque becomes legible. Where a sentence written two centuries ago cracks open like a geode, revealing an entirely new way of seeing.

When I look at old photographs from my time in law school, I am carried back to Locust Walk on the night I visited. Along the edge of the path, several fireflies wrote their poetry in loose, glowing cursive across the darkness. This is the image. This is my totem.

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion writes, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

I am transported back to my ordinary instant—the moment I decided to try something wholly unexpected. The moment I decided to attend law school.

My parents were blue-collar workers. I grew up in a neighborhood still bearing the sting of dilapidated buildings and unfinished promises. No one in my family talked about constitutional law or judicial review over dinner.

And yet there I was.

There is an electric joy in discovering that your mind can do something you never thought was a possibility.

To study the law is to join a centuries-long conversation. To walk the same path as Thurgood Marshall and Sandra Day O’Connor is to feel connected to something larger than oneself.

We studied the same Constitution. We wrestled with many of the same questions. We inherited the same unfinished project.

On Juneteenth, I attended America’s Report Card, an event hosted by our hybrid JD program. During the discussion, panelists examined topics such as federalism, separation of powers, and the health of our democratic institutions. At one point, when responding to a student’s question, Professor Joseph Figueroa remarked that he was encouraged simply because we were all there, in law school.

At a moment when constitutional norms feel increasingly fragile, the country will continue to need attorneys willing to defend the rule of law.

This sentiment was echoed at the 2026 The Colleges of Law commencement, where influential constitutional law scholar and Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky spoke of the critical need for attorneys to do this work.

I am reminded of the line often attributed to Benjamin Franklin after the Constitutional Convention. Asked what form of government the delegates had created, Franklin reportedly replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”

I am spending the Fourth of July holiday in Philadelphia, the city where I attended law school. It feels fitting to return here—to the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, to the city where the Constitution was debated and drafted, to the beating, luminous heart of a nation that remains remarkably and promisingly young at 250 years old.

As I walk these streets again, I expect I will find myself reflecting on what my education truly gave me.

It gave me a profession, certainly.

But more than that, it changed the way I see our country. The Constitution is more than a document preserved beneath glass. Rights endure only when people are willing to defend them, and democracy depends not on certainty, but on participation.

While this work belongs to every citizen, attorneys bear a particular responsibility and occupy a special place within it.

So as America celebrates its 250th year, I find myself unexpectedly grateful—not only for this country and its imperfect experiment, but also for the education that allowed me to better understand it.

And even now, so many years later, I can still see those fireflies drifting across Locust Walk, stitching brief lines of light into the darkness.

I did not know then where the path would lead. I only knew I wanted to follow it.