When she was a 16-year-old student at Avenues, a private school in New York, Olivia Eve Gross started what was probably America’s first high school law review. Now a recent graduate of the University of Chicago, Gross is the founder and CEO of The High School Law Review, an organization that aims to promote the study of constitutional law among young people and to do so in a way that models what she calls “agreeable disagreement.”
Very few people who are not lawyers or scholars of the Constitution read Supreme Court opinions. They are complicated documents in both content and form, so this is not surprising. It is far easier to skim an article in the Washington Post or glance at some armchair pundit’s opinion on X than to take the time to try to understand the law of the land in all its hard-fought, and still often contentious, details. But if you go around praising or railing against such decisions as Dobbs (2022), Students for Fair Admissions (2023), and Loper Bright (2024) without having made at least an effort to grapple with the words of the justices in both the majority and the minority, then no one should care what you think.
A few years ago, I wrote an article that was to some extent inspired by the experience of teaching outstanding students, many of them Orthodox Jews, who arrive in college truly knowing what it means to absorb and argue fiercely over a text, typically the Torah. The article proposed a cost-free gap-year program between high school and college that would stress philological rigor, the textual tradition, and good-faith argument. The Constitution and certain Supreme Court opinions are among the works all participants would read.
Gross, who grew up studying the Talmud, has now partly one-upped my idea as well as brought it to happy fruition. Why not expect high schoolers already to engage seriously with works that will, after all, continue to have a direct effect on their day-to-day lives in this country? And why not expect them to engage with these works, and with one another, in much the same respectful way that Gross “came to appreciate the questioning form of [the Talmudic] text, its embodiment of the principles that opposing views are entitled to receive full consideration and that people can agreeably disagree”?
A piece about Gross that Avenues published when she was a junior in high school notes that she “believes strongly in being comfortable with the uncomfortable.” It also explains that she became fascinated with former Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s book The Supreme Court when she was 11, is “protective of her life-long admiration” of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and especially admires Justice Elena Kagan. She has worked for the conservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and for Nadine Strossen, a distinguished lawyer who was for many years the president of the American Civil Liberties Union. She is, in other words, in a fine position to look at difficult issues from multiple perspectives and to encourage others to do the same.
Because the authors of articles in high school law reviews are minors, Gross has not yet made any of them available to the public, though the first issue of the National High School Law Review will be out next year for all to read. Meantime, she has kindly shared with me copies of two high school reviews from the fall of 2024. One contains dueling perspectives on Trump v. Anderson (2024), while the other has an interesting article on whether obesity should be considered a quasi-suspect classification for the purposes of equal-protection analysis. Gross believes that her outfit will publish about 50 law reviews in the coming year, from schools, both public and private, in such different places as Florida and South Korea.
Today, the world of competitive high school debate is in shambles because many students and judges increasingly believe that there is only one “right”—that is to say, left—point of view. The broader consequences of this trend are alarming. Regardless of where any of us stands politically, we should applaud efforts to combat monolithic thought. Gross’s call to “replace cancel culture with curiosity culture” is an inspired effort that deserves wide recognition.
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