On the first truly raw morning of another Syracuse autumn, 50-plus students, most of them undergraduates, are assembling in Maxwell Auditorium for Constitutional Law I. They have endured a pelting rain under drab skies simply to be here, and few seem ready to dive into the political implications of Supreme Court decisions rendered 125 years ago.

This semester, the course is being taught by Keith Bybee, the new Michael O. Sawyer Professor of Constitutional Law and Politics. Perhaps sensing the tepid enthusiasm of his audience, he opens with an apparent tangent.

“The Constitution is in crisis,” he says. “I mean, literally deteriorating.” He describes how humidity controls in the document’s vault have caused the glass surface beneath it to corrode, in turn damaging the vellum on which it is inscribed. Bybee makes a bad joke about the “framers” of the Constitution and then supplies symbolism. It’s like the federalism debate they’ve been discussing, he says: Finding the right level of humidity to maintain the document is like finding the balance between a strong, organic Constitution and the preservation of state’s rights.

“Don’t let it dry out, but don’t let it rot,” Bybee says. “How do you keep the Constitution from rotting?”

It’s a canny introduction to a lecture on the Supreme Court’s role in the expansion of federal mandate, post-Civil War. As lecture strategy, it may even befit the namesake of the chair Bybee holds. He is quite aware that the core of Michael Sawyer’s legacy is his engaging, imaginative lectures.
“When I was on campus as a candidate for this position,” Bybee recalls, “if I’d ask someone whether they knew Mike Sawyer, their faces would light up. People would break into a smile. Judging by his influence and memories of him, he was an extraordinary teacher.”

Shortly after the completion of Michael Sawyer’s 42-year professorial career at Maxwell, alumni and colleagues funded the chair, citing his impact as one of the School’s truly great mentors and teachers.

But for Bybee, the existence of the Sawyer chair (of which he is the second occupant) is significant also in focusing Maxwell’s extraordinary attention to public law as not only a specialty, but as an essential component of political science. Bybee had been a faculty member in Harvard’s government program before the Sawyer appointment. As an emerging luminary in the field of public law—he is the author of Mistaken Identity: The Supreme Court and the Politics of Minority Representation (1998: Princeton) and now researches the political significance of ambiguous judicial decisions—Bybee is excited by Maxwell’s emphasis. In other places, he says, public law frequently receives perfunctory treatment.

“It amazed me to learn that such a chair exists,” he says. “In political science, public law is something that ought to be of central importance, but it often isn’t.”

For future attorneys, the topic is offered in colleges of law, which is appropriate. But, says Bybee, it needs to be taught also as political science. “Public law sits at the intersection of a number of disciplines: American politics, political philosophy, law itself. It’s no one of them alone,” he says. “There’s a possibility here at Maxwell to speak of public law in all its facets. This is the way public law ought to be considered.”

Bybee gives credit to Maxwell’s much-vaunted interdisciplinary make-up for nurturing a fuller approach to public law. “This place is different in kind,” he says. But he also credits the legacy of Michael Sawyer as a beloved teacher, which now has had a correlative effect: soldering forever the prominence of constitutional law at Maxwell.

—Dana Cooke

This article appeared in the Fall 2002 print edition of Maxwell Perspective; © 2002 Maxwell School of Syracuse University. To request a copy, e-mail dlcooke@maxwell.syr.edu.