Law Schools Left Reeling After Latest Supreme Court Earthquakes

The Hill, Law Schools Left Reeling After Latest Supreme Court Earthquakes:

The Supreme Court isn’t making it easy to be a law professor these days.

After overturning the 40-year-old Chevron deference last week, the justices threw law curricula for another major loop on Monday with their earth-shaking ruling on presidential immunity — all this just two years after Roe v. Wade was struck down after 50 years on the books.

Law school professors have been meeting to discuss the forthcoming changes to their courses, trying to get their heads around the new legal landscape the conservative-leaning court is creating. ...

“It takes us a while to process the opinion, then we talk a lot about it with our colleagues to try to figure out whether the opinion is actually going to be as consequential as we think it is, and then whether it’s the kind of thing that needs to be in an introductory course, in which case you really have to think hard about how it fits into the curriculum, or whether it’s something that’s for a more advanced class, in which case you might be able to sneak it in under a rubric like contemporary developments or something like that,” said Noah Rosenblum, and assistant professor of law at New York University. ...

Law professors say they are lucky such rulings typically happen over the summer as it gives them time to converse with peers about how to teach them in the upcoming school year. ...

Professors say it’s par for the course for attorneys to have to deal with ever-shifting laws. And sometimes it’s easy to see which way the wind is blowing, such as when conservatives chipped away at Roe v. Wade over the years before it was overturned fully in 2022.

But they acknowledge that their students, particularly those preparing for the bar exam, can also be thrown when precedent-changing decisions are dropped.

“For law schools that really have to worry whether their students are going to pass the bar, having constitutional law be a moving target can create challenges, because you might teach it to them in year one, and then essentially in year four or the end of year three, they’re taking the bar exam,” [Sam Erman, professor at the University of Michigan Law School, said]. “And if a lot has changed since they learned constitutional law, then they both have to learn new material to pass the bar, and they have to unlearn old material.”

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