Building Our Future

Law reviews and other legal journals serve an important role in the legal field. The discussions we host, the scholarship we publish, the ideas we consider, and the positions we advance are the future of the law. Law’s future may defer to its history. It may correct its past sins. It may, in the course of the American experiment, make new mistakes that will challenge and educate the next generation. In many ways, legal journals are the anvils upon which scholars forge the law’s future. For that reason, legal scholarship often has a reputation among academics as an important and admirable pursuit. Among others in the profession, journals sometimes have a different reputation. Some in the legal field consider scholarly work too theoretical, out of touch, and idealistic to have much bearing on the real-life practice of law. From their perspective, the average person’s relationship to law and policy is not intellectual, hypothetical, evolving, or niche; it is part of the reality of everyday life. Academia should not ignore that criticism. Instead, it should seek to bridge the gap between scholarly exploration and real-world implementation. With this in mind, Liberty University Law Review is privileged to publish the remarks of Mr. King Randall, I. Mr. Randall is not a lawyer, a professor, or an administrator of higher education. As a result, some might find his presence at our Symposium unusual. But Mr. Randall offers uncommon insight into the hard realities of education in the United States. He knows too well the failures of the existing public education system. He wrestles daily with the practical difficulties of educational alternatives—difficulties that must be addressed whatever path America’s education takes. Because of his proximity to these problems, he is uniquely equipped to add context and a sense of pragmatism to the scholarly debate surrounding the future of American education. What follows is an adaptation of Mr. Randall’s remarks at the 2024 Liberty University Law Review Symposium. We are grateful to Mr. Randall for his continuing work serving and mentoring America’s youth and for his willingness to participate in our Symposium. It is our hope that his contributions will inject urgency and realism into our consideration of educational freedom in the United States.