Academic

The John Roberts Resignation: Who Says That Law Schools Live In A Bubble?

By Dan Filler

In Peter Tague's criminal law class yesterday, he shared the secret that Chief Justice John Roberts planned to resign.  His apparent goal: to teach around the issue of the reliabilty of informants.  But while this might have been an innocent (and probably useful) teaching strategy a decade ago, technology has transformed it into something much more exciting: the production of news!  Because as you might expect, this information was twittered and emailed and blogged from the classroom to the Web.  There it was dutifully reported by Radar Online.  This led to a big scurry around D.C. to confirm or deny this rumor.  ATL kept us up to date yesterday, and then deconstructed the whole event here.

At least nobody got hurt.  I've often heard about criminal procedure profs who have a person run into the room, threaten the teacher with violence, and run out.  Then at the end of class, the teacher sets up a lineup - showing just how difficult it is to recall and identify a suspect after a fast incident.  I've always wanted to do this trick, but once I discovered that some students pack heat in class, I decided that the pedagogical value was probably outweighed by the potential risks.

Oh for those days when the law school really was in a bubble.

Full post as published by The Faculty Lounge on March 05, 2010 (boomark / email).