Thread by @alexaronson

🧵🧵The foundations of American law are crumbling under the weight of the Supreme Court's corrupt activism. Law profs simply can't teach it with a straight face.

Don't take my word for it. Read these 🔥🔥 quotes from our leading legal luminaries in the @nytimes @nytopinion

The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law
nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opi…

“Teaching constitutional law today is an enterprise in teaching students what law isn’t" - @UMichLaw Prof. @LeahLitman

“While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears. . . I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it? I’m feeling very depleted by having to teach it.” - @USCGouldLaw Prof. Rebecca Brown

“I couldn’t stand up in front of the class and pretend the students should take the court seriously in terms of legal analysis.” First-year law students, he felt, “should be taught by someone who still believed in what the court did.” - Former @StanfordLaw Dean Larry Kramer

“One of the primary challenges when one is teaching constitutional law is to impress upon the students that it is not simply politics by other means. . . . And the degree of difficulty of that proposition has never been higher.” - @YaleLawSch Prof. Justin Driver

“What’s changed is that today’s Republican-appointed justices . . .represent the views of a Republican Party that is much more extreme than anything we’ve been accustomed to in the last hundred years.” - @Harvard_Law Prof. Michael Klarman.

Even more troubling than the court’s radical rulings . . . is the rapid and often unprincipled manner in which the justices reach them. “What feels different at this moment is the ambition and the velocity, how fast and aggressively it’s happening.” - @nyulaw @barryfriedman1

“It’s made-up history. No sense of judicial humility. No sense of letting governments work out their problems.” @UCLA_Law Prof. Lee Epstein

“Flat-out bonkers. . . . what if this were a seminar paper? Who knows what grade you’d give it? It’s so strange as an exercise in what we might call legal reasoning. But it’s not a seminar paper; it’s a majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court....

...So what am I supposed to do with that?” - @UTexasLaw Sandy Levinson.

Not even Federalist Society stalwarts can defend this unprincipled Court. Here's @StanfordLaw's Michael McConnell: "Bruen is not right under its own principles . . . It purports to be applying originalist and historicist interpretation, and it gets it wrong.”

Prof. @barryfriedman1 again, offering plainspoken truth: “When you combine overruling with no appreciable change or explanation other than that the membership of the court has changed, what you have is naked power.”

My phenomenal constitutional litigation Prof., the brilliant Pam Karlan, on how times have changed: "There was this notion that judges were these heroes who would save us all. Our students do not have that view.”

FedSoc's McConnell again: "I said something to the effect of, ‘It’s important to assume that the people you disagree with are speaking in good faith.’ And a student raises his hand and he asks, ‘Why? Why should we assume that people on the other side are acting in good faith?’...

..."This was not a crazy person; this was a perfectly sober-minded, rational student. And I think the question was sincere. And I think that’s kind of shocking. I do think that some of the underlying assumptions of how a civil society operates can no longer be assumed.”

And the legendary @tribelaw with the 🔥 kicker: The current court is “off on a jag of its own." "Unless and until it changes, the court will be seen as an increasingly bizarre institution that hasn’t caught up with the nature of law itself.”

Behold this wreckage, and let's get real. It's time for us to dramatically change our course.