I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me (xpost from Good Reads)

[MosheFeingold]

55. I was never a "real" professor

But I taught legislative drafting on-and-off at several prominent law schools because I was a Congressional staffer and more-or-less drafted legislation for a living. Unsexy stuff, but bad drafting can be a disaster and these law schools tended to send people to government.

As part of this, the class would look at various historical laws and how courts would interpret said laws and how the bureaucracy would apply such laws.

The best teaching material would be really foul/controversial laws (e.g., Jim Crow laws, abortion, draft) because those are laws that people fought about and there was a lot of court cases/rules/regs/follow up laws so you could see how the process worked in the meat grinder that is Congress.

Over the course of 30 years various of the students gradually got pretty egg-shelled (or so distracted by the politics that they couldn't deal with the legal issues --- which would be their JOBS), so you couldn't even have a discussion of the relevant legal issues.

I often wondered how they hoped to cope in an antagonistic legal setting.