Law Schools Wussifying Courses to Protect Snowflake

WASHINGTON - June 10, 2021 - PRLog -- The ever-growing effort to protect law students from ideas which might upset them took another giant step forward with a suggestion that courses in constitutional law completely omit some landmark Supreme Court decision is likely to leave them unable to fight for controversial clients and important causes, charges public interest law professor John Banzhaf.

The movement to wuss down the law school experience has already led to many criminal law professors no longer teaching students the law of rape because it might offend some students - a development making them less able to defend clients charged with the offense.

It could also make them less likely to fight to reform rape laws.

For example, many law students believe that sexual intercourse without consent constitutes rape, as does having sex with a person who is drunk.  But neither is true in most states, so young lawyers are less likely to fight to remedy these problems if they don't even know they exist, says Banzhaf.

But real "trauma" is what happens when your client is wrongfully sentenced to prison for rape, or when a women who has been raped cannot obtain justice because of loopholes in existing rape law,  - not when law students sitting in the sterile setting of a classroom simply hear words like "rape," "violated," etc.

Steilen suggests law professors either not teach landmark Supreme Court rulings which might offend some students or, if that's not possible, not have them read or discuss words in the rulings which could upset them.  For example, he refuses to teach Plessy v. Ferguson [which upheld the "separate but equal" doctrine], and slashes the Dred Scott decision [denying citizenship to Blacks] to only two paragraphs.

Of course, similar arguments can be made about other landmark Supreme Court decisions which likewise may offend such as Korematsu v. United States which led to the interment of Japanese Americans; Bradwell v. The State which upheld barring women from practicing law ("The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life."); and even Roe v Wade which upheld what some regard as murder.

By this logic, presumably law students should not be asked to read or discuss portions of the Constitution which state that enslaved persons count as only "three-fifths" or a person, or that enslaved people "escaping into another" state "shall be delivered" back to the slave owner, suggests Banzhaf.

To those who suggest that this is just too far fetched, the professor notes that it has already happened.

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