The books targeted primarily for law school audiences attempt to draw the distinction between principal and secondary cases. These books contain more case excerpts than other books, but fewer principal cases. None of the books relying on the principal- secondary distinction offers an explicit rationale its use. At the beginning of this paper, I posed a simple question. It is now time for an answer.
Public law has a canon, but it appears a trifling one.
There is almost no agreement on the principal cases that form our civil rights and civil liberties tradition. The other cases in the very small common set reflect only a few of the great constitutional disputes of our history. Interestingly, there are three nineteenth century cases among the ten common cases and they are all the work of one justice, John Marshall. It is fair to say that the great chief justice has left a legacy that towers over any of his contemporaries or successors. Still, the size of the canon is trivial, which is not what I expected.