Law Schools

Law School Offers Class On Trump & The Constitution, Gets Attacked With Scare Quotes

This is some of the heaviest lifting I've ever seen quotation marks do.

By Chris Williams on September 06, 2024 10:01 am
Trump Visits Church Across From White House That Was Hit by Fire

Here’s the alleged Christianist holding a Bible. (Photo by Shawn Thew/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

When writing, word choice and punctuation can do a lot of heavy lifting. For example, referring to Trump as an “alleged White supremacist supporter” feels a little suspect because of the word alleged and the surrounding scare quotes. To do so would also be a wholly accurate description of him despite what some members of the Oregon Bar would like to believe. A recent article covering a law school’s constitutional law course uses a lot of scare quotes and dismissive language to draw suspicion over the course material. It is worth looking at. This is from the Daily Caller:

A top public university’s law school is offering a class this fall that aims to explore the U.S.’ political shift towards “authoritarian Christianist nationalism” in the “age of Trump,” according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Law School class, titled “Statutory Interpretation,” is offered to second-year law students and will hinge on topics of relevance in the current election season, including former president Donald Trump’s legal battles and the Supreme Court’s supposed “legitimacy crisis,” professor Paul Campos told students in an email obtained by DCNF. Campos noted in the email that the course could be more aptly named “The Crisis of the American Legal System in the Age of Trump.”

The first big scare quote breakdown; it is really hard to downplay Trump’s policies as “nationalistic” when he is literally running on “America First” as a slogan:

Hard to beat the authoritarian allegations when he has openly repeated that he wanted to be a dictator for a day:

And for “Christianist”… what other religion would they associate with this clear Bible-in-hand PR move? Zoroastrianism?

The article doesn’t get much better from there. The “supposed” legitimacy crisis isn’t some fringe theory: we covered a Harvard professor flagging it as a genuine problem for democracy back in 2022, and the Court’s approval rating has only gotten lower.

The article goes on to share the laments of the  student who was “dissapointed that the school would offer such a course” and was taught Constitutional Law by a professor that “openly called for the rewriting of the Constitution.” That can sound scary in a vacuum, but it’s pretty tame once you realize Trump was on record advocating for getting rid of the whole damned thing:

Call me crazy but terminating all rules, even constitutional ones, sounds a lot more drastic than a professor who thinks a 300+ year-old document written by slaveowners could use some editing.

The student went on to opine that, “It is absurd that a public university in this age would push the narrative that there is a secret cabal being pushed by members of a religion to overthrow the government[.]” I’m sorry, is that not what happened on January 6th? Because, again, all of this is pretty well-documented:

https://twitter.com/ncookbouton/status/1743813654867558583

Shifting back to attacking the professor teaching the course, the author of the article goes on to quote Paul Campos as saying that the former president is a “total moron” who “represents every horrible personality trait and political instinct that fueled the Reagan revolution.” I’m not sure how much you can really fault Campos when every person who has ran as Trump’s VP has singled out Trump as a problem for the American public. Here’s Pence:

And here’s Alleged Couch Boy calling Trump America’s Hitler (that should be read as an insult, by the way):

In short, scare quotes do not a cogent criticism make. By the way, if you attend the school and plan on taking the course, feel free to use this article as the basis for your outline.

EXCLUSIVE: Law School Offers Course That Explores Rise Of ‘Authoritarian Christianist Nationalism’ In ‘Age Of Trump’ [Daily Caller]

Earlier: Litigant Successfully Wins Right To Not Be Associated With True Statements About Donald Trump

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.