The Supreme Court is not making being a law professor any easier these days.
After striking down Chevron’s 40-year-old deference last week, the justices launched their legal resumes for another big cycle on Monday with their earth-shattering ruling on presidential immunity — all just two years after Roe v. Wade. in books.
Law school professors have been meeting to discuss upcoming changes to their courses, trying to understand the new legal landscape the conservative-leaning court is creating.
“Administrative law goes through some periods when change is glacial, if it occurs at all, and other periods when it is extremely rapid. The period around the New Deal is a period of very rapid change, the Nixon administration and immediately following was a period of rapid change and this is now a period of very rapid change,” said David Super, a law professor at Georgetown. “So if you compared a syllabus from three years ago, four years ago, to one from next year, I think you would see not just different cases, but different topics being discussed.”
The Supreme Court ruled that presidents have broad immunity from prosecution when they engage in official acts of office, giving former President Trump a major victory in the federal criminal case relating to January 6, 2021, and his efforts to remain in office.
“This is really out of line with many, many of the previous cases. It’s also out of line with the line of cases regarding presidential immunity where the court has made it very clear that presidents are not above the law, but this ruling says, in these are important ways,” said Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.
“And so, it’s going to be difficult to know how to teach this, to know how to teach this to students, because it really requires us to rethink and reshape what we’ve been teaching them all along,” she added.
And this decision to rewrite the books came one day after the court struck down Chevron, which allowed judges to trust government agencies when an ambiguous law is prosecuted based on interpretation. Judges will now have to use their best interpretation of the law when deciding a case, making it much easier to overturn regulations.
“We do not question prior cases that depended on Chevron’s structure,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. “Decisions in these cases where specific agency actions are lawful – including Chevron’s own Clean Air Act decision – are still subject to statutory rulings, despite our change in interpretive methodology.”
Law professors say they are lucky that these decisions typically happen over the summer, as it gives them time to talk with colleagues about how to teach them in the upcoming school year.
“We take a while to process the opinion, then we talk about it a lot with our colleagues to try to figure out whether the opinion is really 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 that case, you really need to think long and hard about how this fits into the curriculum or if it’s something for a more advanced class; in that case, you might be able to shove it under a rubric like contemporary developments or something like that,” said Noah Rosenblum, an assistant professor of law at New York University.
In the coming years, experts say, textbooks will be changed and lower courts will help narrow the scope of use of new case law.
“We’re in a period of rapid constitutional change, and that means we don’t know where it’s going,” said Sam Erman, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School.
Depending on their areas of expertise, some teachers are used to constant changes in legislation, but even among these specialties, the last few years may be unprecedented.
“It is a conservative supermajority that is building a new vision of constitutional law and we are watching it unfold,” said Erman. “And so I also have to decide which topics to cover,” he added, as previous topics that didn’t seem so interesting or relevant “will become a big topic and we have to dedicate time to that.”
Teachers say it’s normal for lawyers to have to deal with constantly changing laws. And sometimes it’s easy to see which way the wind is blowing, like when conservatives gutted Roe v. Wade. Wade over the years before being written off entirely in 2022.
But they recognize that their students, especially those preparing for the bar exam, can also be rejected when precedent-altering decisions are abandoned.
“For law schools that really have to worry about whether their students will pass the bar, having constitutional law as a moving target can create challenges because you can teach it to them in their first year and essentially in their fourth year or so. at the end of the third year, they are taking the bar exam,” Erman said. “And if a lot has changed since they learned constitutional law, then they will both have to learn new material to pass the bar and they will have to unlearn the old material.”
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
