How to Teach Constitutional Law [TEASER]

Michael, I have great affection for you, and you lead a very rich and interesting life, but you're a bag man, not an attorney.

Hey, everyone, this is Leon from Fiasco and Prologue Projects.

On this episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael discuss a piece from the New York Times.

It's a recent editorial titled The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law by Jesse Wegman.

The piece addressed how the court's conservative supermajority has led to a crisis of faith among law professors.

When it was published on February 26th, the piece was seized upon for many of its quotes, which revealed how out of touch much of the academy remains.

Today, the hosts deconstruct the article to get at how and why so many in legal academia are still beholden to a legal mythology at least half a century out of date.

This This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the legal academy suffer.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have impaired our civil rights, like my orthodontist is impairing my podcasting career.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

Fourth grader problems.

Yeah, I was going to say,

what's going on, bud?

Yeah.

So, first of all,

don't be ableist against people with fucked up teeth.

The basic story is that, like a year and change ago, I got Invisalign, and I like my Arthadonist.

He seems to know what he's doing.

The only problem with him is that he doesn't tell me what's happening.

He'll be like, all right, scheduling another appointment for two months from now.

And I show up and it might just be a check-in and he's like, you're looking great.

And it might be like today where where he was like, We're going to put metal on your teeth and then you're going to hook rubber bands around them at night.

So, right before I go on a vacation,

the wife and I are going to Buenos Aires, and I was, I was planning on taking pictures, you know, stuff like that.

Uh, now I look like a big, dumb asshole.

No, you don't look like a big, dumb asshole.

You look like a child nerd.

Yeah, that's right.

You look like me in my awkward phase, which lasted 15 years.

fair i look i had braces when i was young uh and didn't wear my retainer and kids if you're listening wear your retainer or or else this happens or else uh you get an orthodontist uh being like you should you have to do a invisaline you're like how much does it cost and then he tells you and you're like oh no

i'm just i i just accepted it i i had really up teeth as a kid i mean i had to have oral surgery because they were like one of them came in in like the roof of my mouth so i'm i'm i i have much empathy for you peter Fair enough.

It's not really about straightness in my case.

It was basically they read to me a series of worst case scenarios about what would happen to my mouth in the next 30 years.

And

it wasn't just aesthetics.

It was like, you know, you will die.

You will die if you let this keep going on.

Or you can pay me for Invisalign.

I was like, yeah, I'll do that.

I think you got scammed, buddy.

I'm a huge sucker for an artist.

I don't know if they're lying or not.

I can't tell.

All right, let's advance through this episode.

We are doing a premium episode today about how we teach constitutional law.

This is a hot topic.

One of the challenges posed by the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court is that they are changing constitutional law.

and interpretation so much that it makes it difficult to teach.

Long-standing doctrines are being upended.

New modes of interpretation are being created.

So it's tough to figure out how to handle it if you are a professor.

The New York Times published a piece about this called The Crisis in Teaching Constitutional Law.

And it's interesting because it describes this very real challenge, but also because it interviews a host of law professors, many of whom proceed to completely show their ass.

That's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

to reveal themselves as hapless fools.

And since we are a podcast founded on the fundamental truth that the legal academy and the legal profession don't think about the law the right way, we thought we would walk through this piece step by step.

Yeah, I think we advertised on the last episode that this Patreon, this premium episode, would be about something completely different, Texas border politics and state and federal tension.

But we saw this article and we said,

sorry, folks, we've got to talk about this, actually.

Right.

And so as we move through kind of reading excerpts of this article, picking it apart, I think I want listeners to know we're dunking.

We are going to dunk on some of these professors because they say absolutely ridiculous things.

But we're dunking for

a reason.

All of these people are extremely smart.

We are not saying that they're not smart.

Many of them, we have read their work, we have learned from.

And, you know, we also want to recognize too that The three of us have been interviewed for various purposes.

It sucks when a quote is pulled out of context, you know, one sentence that you said, but not the other sentence is included in the interview or the profile.

We get all that, right?

But we simply cannot miss this opportunity where so much of the point of our show is made for us.

Yes.

In the paragraphs of the New York Times, because law professors are talking.

Yeah.

One of the reasons we're dunking is just because it's fun too, by the way.

Somebody threw us an alley oop and we're like, we're going to fucking slam that shit.

So I'm going to read the introductory paragraphs of this

more or less in full so that we're all in the same state of mind.

If you attended law school at any time over the past half century, your course in constitutional law likely followed a well-worn path.

First, you learned the basics, the Supreme Court's power to say what the Constitution means.

Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe.

This episode is one of our premium Patreon-only episodes.

Membership starts at just five bucks a month.

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That's five four pod all spelled out.

Members get a bunch of stuff.

Not only do you get access to the premium episodes, but access to subscriber-only events, discounts on merch, and at the $10 a month level, you get bigger discounts on merch and membership in the incredibly rowdy 5-4 Slack.

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5-4-Pod, all spelled out.

Become a member today.