Teaching the Roberts Court: Challenges, Opportunities, and Strategies

In its most recent years the Supreme Court has decided cases that have reached new understandings of fundamental constitutional rights (Dobbs, Bruen), put pressure on the administrative state (the major questions doctrine) and otherwise deeply changed our understanding of the law. Does this court and its decisions require a starkly different approach to how law is taught in classrooms? Should law professors continue to emphasize doctrine?  Or should they emphasize the realpolitik of judicial decision-making? Should the case method give way to more teaching about organizing or lobbying? What should law schools and legal pedagogy look like in response to the Court’s most recent phase?

Moderator:
Jeannie Suk Gersen, John H. Watson, Jr. Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Panelists: 
Randy Barnett, Patrick Hotung Professor of Constitutional Law, Georgetown Law

Robert Chang, Executive Director, Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality and Professor of Law, Seattle University School of Law

Olatunde Johnson,  Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’59 Professor of Law, Columbia Law School

Michele Bratcher Goodwin,  Chancellor’s Professor of Law , UC Irvine Law; Abraham Pinanski Visiting Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Maggie Lemos, Robert G. Seaks LL.B. ’34 Professor of Law,  Duke Law

This is the fourth event in The Supreme Court in a Constitutional Democracy Harvard Law School Lecture Series