Why I Write this Blog

I am a law professor at an ABA-approved law school in Los Angeles. In college, I studied government and history, with a focus on western civilization and American institutions. I completed course work and written exams towards a Ph.D. in political science at Stanford University, with a focus on political theory, American government, and public law. After transferring from Harvard Law School, I graduated from Stanford Law School, having taken every constitutional law course offered, as well as jurisprudence and American legal history. After several years in legal practice at prominent law firms, I moved to a teaching career. Because of my practice background, I have taught a wide variety of business law courses, but my passion has always been with constitutional law, legal history, and jurisprudence.

I taught those subjects for several decades, in one form or another since I was a graduate student, at different institutions and under various professors and deans, garnering excellence in teaching and other awards and recognitions along the way. That ended when my school’s administration assigned me during the heated political temperature of 2020-2022 to teach a course that would be less controversial for someone with my perspectives than constitutional law. My views about the nature and purpose of law, my philosophical leanings, and my teaching of constitutional law as informed by the Constitution and by Supreme Court opinions rather than the wishful thinking of the progressive faculty lounges have made me a rare specimen, a “conservative” law professor. I use quotes here because labeling my thinking as conservative is simplistic. It is accurate, however, that I am not one of the herd of center-left to far-left to ultra-left types who currently American law schools, including mine. In that sense, I truly am a token conservative.

This blog is the successor to one I published several years during the 2000s and early 2010s. I discontinued that edition because my time became consumed with work, family obligations, and building a successful personalized bar review course for law students. Those burdens collectively have eased. I have restarted the blog to try again, in some small way, to penetrate the intellectual smog which envelops legal education and suffocates open dissent from the legal academy’s orthodoxy. As concerning as matters of free exchange and diversity of tolerated ideas at most American universities stood during the blog’s prior iteration, they have deteriorated alarmingly since. It likely goes without saying, that the perspectives expressed here are my own and not those of the administration or faculty of my law school, at least not perspectives they would acknowledge having above whispered tones.