EVEN THE PROFESSORS WHO FAVOR THE RESULTS...:

The Postradical Legal Generation: Elite law schools, and the court nominees who come from them, have changed (David Fontana, 5/19/10, Chromicle of Higher Education)

All three graduated from their respective law schools (Obama and Kagan from Harvard Law School, Sotomayor from Yale Law School) at a time when most of the more-radical members of the faculty had either already disappeared or were losing their last battles. More than that generation, Sotomayor, Obama, and Kagan have avoided major ideological fights and the most polarizing legal issues. Indeed, in the cases of Obama and Kagan, they helped move their law schools beyond the more-polarizing ideological battles.

In that way, all three are part of the law-school "postradical generation." Just as that helps us better understand their careers, the dynamic also helps explain some of the difficulties Obama will have in appointing influential liberal judges.

The law and the law schools that teach it are temperamentally more conservative than the rest of the university. Anthropologists or sociologists do not teach their classes wearing suits, but law professors often do. While students in the humanities might be considered to have dressed up if they attend class in jeans, law students are often caught wearing nothing more casual than khaki pants. The professionalism of the American law school is evident.

...tend to be pretty honest about how illegitimate the Court's means of getting there are.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 22, 2010 8:34 AM