Race- and gender-focused studies are laughable mainly for two reasons: first, they almost always represent an overtly politicized concession to campus pressure groups that want a degree without doing even a minimum of work, and second, they aim to be hypercritical of everything except the myths that each is founded on. Racial demagoguery has no relationship to the study of constitutional law, and is certainly nowhere near as successful as economic study of law generally in producing information that lawyers and legislators can actually use.

#1 has it exactly right. Even a TTT law school makes its professors write for tenure. Obama was a glorified adjunct at Chicago. The Times makes "senior lecturer" sound like a prestigious position (they pointed out that only a few federal judges hold it), but it's really a part-time position.

What is truly shocking, though, is the fact that Chicago was going to give him tenure without his having written ONE WORD, even as president of the Harvard Law Review.

2: you're being ridiculous. Just because it's "nowhere near as successful" at producing a corpus of scholarly study doesn't mean that it doesn't enjoy a modest success rate that justifies its use. Moreover, if you had read the article carefully, you would see that Obama deployed these methods on cases based on identity politics, such as Loving v. Virginia.

*would have seen

2: your other point is so silly that I'm hardly going to bother debating it with you. Whether you like it or not, racial tensions and conflicts have had a profound impact on the development of our country, laws, and constitution. Obama did the school a service by engaging these issues in a remarkably interesting one, as the article attests.

While there is, undoubtedly, a political dimension to this curriculum, it is a necessary one -- every bit as necessary as legal realism or L&E.

5: Why is "this curriculum" (soft CLS?) necessary? I mean, honestly, why do we have to talk about this shit? (Bonus points for not making the stupid "We have to challenge our assumptions" argument)

It's necessary because it helps us tap into the theoretical elements of some cases. Much as L&E helps you read property, and legal realism makes sense of judicial policy, identity politics allows readers to analyze civil rights and the constitution.

Therefore, it's a necessary part of every school's curriculum.

And, no, I won't make the "challenge assumptions" argument because most millennials grew up in a PC world (no pun intended).

6: Furthermore, the classic legal curriculum makes it obvious that, in fact, we *don't* have to study "this s***." Contemporary legal scholars have moved away from CLS; and Obama's pedagogical methods, as described in the NYT article, are neither standard nor orthodox.

-- no. 7