There is a difference between reading about history and standing in a place where history surrounds you.
For two weeks this past summer, I had the opportunity to experience that difference while studying at the University of Oxford through Rutgers Law School’s Constitutions and the Founding of the American Republic program. I went to England expecting to learn more about the United States Constitution. I returned with something broader: a deeper understanding of how law develops, why institutions matter, and why legal education should sometimes take us beyond the classroom and into the places, histories, and ideas that shaped the materials we study.
That is part of what makes opportunities like this so valuable for law students. Much of law school necessarily happens through cases, statutes, constitutions, briefs, and classroom discussions. We are trained to read carefully, question assumptions, distinguish precedent, and construct arguments from text. But law does not develop in isolation. It is a product of people, political movements, historical circumstances, competing philosophies, and institutions. Traveling abroad gave us an opportunity to engage those dimensions of our legal education in a way that would have been difficult to replicate from a classroom in Newark.
From Rutgers to Oxford
Our experience was made possible through Rutgers’ partnership with the University of Oxford, Pembroke College, and the Quill Project, an initiative dedicated to studying the creation and development of foundational legal texts.
The Quill Project was particularly meaningful to our study because it asks us to look beyond the final version of a constitutional document. When most Americans encounter the Constitution, we encounter it as finished text. We see the seven articles and amendments preserved in textbooks, casebooks, government buildings, and online archives. It can be easy to forget that the Constitution did not simply appear in its final form.
It was debated.
It was revised.
It was compromised over.
Proposals succeeded and failed. Language changed. Delegates disagreed about the allocation of power, representation, federalism, executive authority, individual liberty, and the relationship between the states and the national government.
The Quill Project helps make that process visible. For me, that was one of the most valuable aspects of our time at Oxford. We were not simply asking, “What does the Constitution say?” We were asking harder questions: Why does it say this? What alternatives were considered? Who advocated for them? What problems were the framers attempting to solve? And what can that history teach us about the constitutional questions we continue to debate today?
Those questions brought the founding period to life.
Wrestling With the Republic
Throughout our coursework and lectures, we engaged directly with the ideas that surrounded the founding of the United States. We discussed the Federalist Papers and figures such as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, while also considering the arguments of the anti-federalists and others who questioned whether the proposed Constitution concentrated too much power in a new national government. We considered thinkers and political figures including John Adams and Thomas Paine and examined the competing ideas about representation, liberty, republican government, and political power that animated the revolutionary and founding periods.
Those discussions reminded me that many questions we sometimes treat as modern are not particularly modern at all.
How powerful should the executive be? How should power be divided among branches of government? What should the relationship between national and state governments look like? How do we prevent governmental power from becoming abusive while still giving government enough authority to function? What protections should individuals have from the state? And perhaps most fundamentally, what does it actually mean to govern a diverse nation through a constitutional system?
We wrestled directly with the text of the 1787 Constitution, including the structures established by Articles I, II, and III, as well as the Bill of Rights and the development of the constitutional system that followed ratification.
But this was not simply another Constitutional Law course.
We were studying what formed constitutional law.
Instead of beginning with a Supreme Court opinion interpreting a provision generations later, we had the opportunity to step backward and consider the circumstances that produced the provision in the first place. We discussed why the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate for the young nation, why delegates believed a new governing framework was necessary, and how disagreements at the Constitutional Convention ultimately shaped the document that emerged from Philadelphia.
And we debated.
Did the framers get it right? Which compromises made the Constitution possible, and what did those compromises cost? Does the governmental structure created in 1787 remain effective for a nation the framers could never have imagined? When constitutional structures create tension or dysfunction today, is that evidence of failure, or is tension an intentional feature of a system designed to prevent any one institution from accumulating too much power?
There were not always simple answers. That was precisely the point.
Legal education should teach us to become comfortable with difficult questions. As future attorneys, our responsibility is not merely to memorize what the law is. We must understand where it came from, interrogate the reasoning supporting it, recognize its consequences, and develop the ability to argue thoughtfully about what it should become.
Studying History While Living Among It
There was something almost surreal about leaving a discussion about an eighteenth-century constitutional debate and walking back into Oxford.
Oxford constantly reminded us that the history we were studying did not begin in 1776 or 1787. We were walking through a city whose institutions, buildings, traditions, and intellectual life stretch back centuries before the founding of the United States. We studied in the Bodleian Libraries, explored different parts of the University of Oxford, and dormed time at Pembroke College. Buildings that would be considered extraordinarily old in the United States were simply part of the landscape around us.
That environment changed the way I thought about time and institutions.
The American constitutional experiment is more than two centuries old, which can feel ancient when studying American law. In Oxford, however, two centuries suddenly did not feel very long. We were surrounded by institutions and structures whose histories reach back toward the medieval period.
That perspective made our conversations about the Constitution even more interesting. The framers were attempting to create something that could endure beyond themselves. More than two hundred years later, we are still interpreting their words, debating their decisions, challenging their assumptions, and asking how the governmental system they constructed should operate in circumstances they could never have predicted.
That is an extraordinary legacy, even when we disagree about what that legacy requires of us.
England Became Our Classroom
Our education also continued well beyond our formal lectures.
We traveled to London, where we toured Parliament and saw firsthand the institution at the center of a constitutional system that developed differently from our own. Seeing Parliament after spending days discussing American constitutional structure made the comparison between the two systems much more tangible.
We saw Big Ben and the London Eye, cruised along the River Thames, visited Buckingham Palace, explored Borough Market, and experienced different neighborhoods and parts of London. We spent a day at Windsor Castle, surrounded again by the layers of British political and cultural history that preceded the American founding.
Back in Oxford, we went punting, visited museums, ate at local restaurants, enjoyed tea, explored the city, and spent hours studying together in the libraries.
Eventually, something shifted.
We stopped feeling entirely like visitors.
We learned the shortcuts. We developed favorite places. We recognized neighbors and familiar faces. We became more comfortable navigating Oxford without constantly checking a map. Conversations that began during lectures continued over dinner, on walks, in libraries, and during bus rides.
Those moments mattered just as much as the formal itinerary.
Studying abroad creates a different kind of classroom. Your classmates become your travel companions. A museum becomes an extension of a lecture. A conversation over dinner becomes an opportunity to reconsider something discussed hours earlier. Standing inside Parliament makes a conversation about governmental structure feel less theoretical. Walking through a centuries-old college forces you to think differently about what it means for an institution to endure.
The classroom no longer has walls.
Understanding What It Meant for Me to Be There
There was also a more personal dimension to this experience that I do not want to overlook.
I experienced Oxford not only as a law student, but as a first-generation African American male law student.
There were moments during those two weeks when I deliberately stopped and allowed myself to take in where I was. I was studying at Oxford. I was sitting in libraries where generations of scholars had studied before me. I was discussing the structure of the American Republic with professors and classmates. I was walking through Parliament and institutions connected to histories that have shaped governments, economies, and societies around the world.
For someone whose journey into the legal profession was never something I could take for granted, that mattered.
Representation is often discussed in terms of who occupies courtrooms, law firms, legislatures, boardrooms, and law school classrooms. But representation also means having access to the experiences that help prepare people to enter those spaces confidently. It means being able to travel, study internationally, engage scholars, encounter different legal and political traditions, and see yourself as someone who belongs in intellectual spaces that may once have seemed distant.
I did not take that privilege lightly.
I also know that I was not experiencing Oxford only for myself. I carried with me the people who encouraged me to pursue law school, the communities that invested in me, and the students who may come after me and wonder whether an opportunity like this is really meant for them.
It is.
Bringing Oxford Back to Newark
The connecting theme of these two weeks, for me, was perspective.
The Constitution itself represents an attempt to bring competing perspectives together to create a functioning system of government. Our classes challenged us to consider the perspectives of federalists and anti-federalists, delegates and dissenters, those who supported the proposed governmental structure and those who feared what it might become.
Oxford gave me another kind of perspective. It allowed me to step outside my familiar environment and examine American government from across the Atlantic, surrounded by a political and intellectual history much older than the republic we were studying.
And my own journey gave the experience yet another perspective: that of a first-generation law student recognizing both the distance I have traveled and the responsibility that comes with the opportunities I have received.
I returned to Rutgers with more questions than I had when I left, and I consider that a sign of a worthwhile legal education. I understand more about the Constitution, but I am also more curious about the choices behind it. I appreciate our governmental structure while feeling more prepared to question it. And I am more aware that becoming a good attorney requires more than knowing rules and precedent. It requires understanding people, history, institutions, competing viewpoints, and the world in which law operates.
That is why I would encourage Rutgers Law students and law students everywhere to take advantage of opportunities like this whenever possible.
Go beyond the casebook. Study somewhere unfamiliar. Sit in a different library. Encounter another political system. Ask questions you cannot answer immediately. Talk to scholars whose perspectives differ from yours. Explore the city after class. Get lost and figure out your way back.
Law school will teach us a tremendous amount about the law.
Experiences like Oxford can teach us something equally important: how much larger the world is in which we will be called to practice it.
About the Author
Thyquel M. Halley is a Juris Doctor candidate at Rutgers Law School in Newark, where he is actively engaged in scholarship, student leadership, and service. He serves as a Research Assistant, Minority Student Program Ambassador, Director of Newark Community Relations for the Student Bar Association, Association of Black Law Students Representative, Admissions Ambassador, Themis Representative, and Christian Legal Society Representative. His broader involvement in the legal community includes service with the Northeast Region of the National Black Law Students Association and the Metropolitan Black Bar Association.
A first-generation law student and native of Jersey City, New Jersey, Thyquel earned his B.A. in Political Science, with minors in Pre-Law and African & African American Studies, from New Jersey City University. He currently serves as Assistant Director at the Rutgers University Foundation supporting advancement initiatives for Rutgers University–Newark, and as a Commissioner on the Newark Equitable Growth Advisory Commission.