Mark Verbitsky was teaching his course on constitutional law this spring when Kilmar Abrego Garcia was deported against a federal judge’s order to El Salvador where he was imprisoned.
Verbitsky, a professor of teaching in political science in the College of Letters and Science, first taught constitutional law at UC Davis in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected for his first presidential term.
His class then was full of students eager to learn what his presidency meant for the Constitution. This year, the start of the President’s second term in office, Verbitsky said it’s like a repeat but much faster and much bigger.
Verbitsky has enlisted some of his best students as learning assistants to help teach the Constitution. They cover the history and thinking behind the Constitution as well as how it’s been interpreted in the courts. Besides learning the material at a deeper level, Verbitsky also mentors them to teach what they have learned. The class as a whole benefits.
“They've gone through the class,” said Verbitsky. “They've done the learning and now they’re another resource for other students.”
How peer learning strengthens constitutional law education
Learning assistants in Verbitsky’s class play a lot of roles. They sit with their peers during group discussions where they answer questions but also facilitate the conversation. They respond to student emails, explain assignments and give tutorials on writing research papers.
Verbitsky said that learning assistants increase the overall learning resources students have available. They make the class material much more accessible, and students often feel more comfortable reaching out to peers who really understand their struggles.
Having a peer to ask for help made a difference to one student, who had struggled to keep up and began skipping class. One day, she mustered up the courage to reach out — not to Verbitsky, but to a learning assistant.
“She was able to explain things to me in a way where I did not feel bad about asking and I was then able to finally get that footing I needed to be able to progress in class,” the student wrote.
Learning to teach the U.S. Constitution
Verbitsky also asks learning assistants to give a 15-20 minute lecture on a case in constitutional law. It’s a rare opportunity that none of his learning assistants have turned down.
Ibrahim Dagher took Verbitsky up on the offer in 2023. Today he is a second-year student at Yale Law School studying for his J.D. as well as a Ph.D. in philosophy. Dagher said that Verbitsky’s class is similar to the classes he takes now as a graduate student at Yale.
For his lecture in Verbitsky’s class, Dagher chose to cover how the Constitution intersects with education. He focused on the 1973 case of San Antonio ISD vs. Rodriguez. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that disparities in funding among school districts did not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because education is not a fundamental right under the Constitution.
But the ruling itself is only a small part of understanding what the case means for constitutional law. The case, he said, was really about the tension between our values in society over an idea like education and the Constitution’s text with its own original meaning and purpose. Nowhere in the Constitution does it mention a right to education.
“The beauty of the American system is that the Constitution is limited in what it says but it does lay boundaries, and then we build on top of that through the legislatures,” said Dagher. “That was something I emphasized, because it was hard to understand why the court didn't want to be very expansionist about these rights.”
In total, Dagher’s research to prepare for his talk filled 126 pages. When he submitted his presentation deck to Verbitsky, he got some feedback.
“He said that's way too much,” said Dagher. “He told me that the idea is to maximize what students get out of a lecture, not what you put into it, because often times putting in more doesn't mean people get more out of it. So I made that adjustment.”
Keeping up with the shifting landscape of constitutional law
Since January, the constitutional landscape separating the powers of the Executive, Legislative and Judiciary has been shifting in real time.
Government actions related to immigration, university funding and many other areas are all subject to Supreme Court cases right now. The outcomes will directly affect students’ lives.
During office hours in the spring, a student asked Verbitsky what their friend, an international student, can post online, and whether they are protected by the First Amendment right to free speech.
“It's hard to keep track of everything, so it's exhausting,” said Verbitsky. “It's exciting from the teaching side because the students are interested in sort of a desperate way to understand what’s happening.”
For his students, the Constitution matters and what they learn sticks.
A couple months after he gave his lecture, Dagher received an unexpected email to his UC Davis inbox. He had already graduated and was thinking ahead to fall when he would start at Yale.
The message was from a student in Verbitsky’s class who had sat through his presentation on San Antonio ISD vs. Rodriguez. She was extremely thankful for the concepts she learned. In fact, she had used those concepts in a job interview and got hired.
“It sort of melted my heart,” said Dagher. “It was a testament to what Professor Verbitsky said, because I took a lot of stuff out of that lecture but obviously the meaning stuck.”
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