I would say most professors probably accept some amount of legal realism, but
(a) it comes out more in some subjects than others. For example, you’ll see the topic discussed more in Constitutional Law classes than you will in more technical subjects like Contracts or Intellectual Property
(b) Even if they believe in legal realism, a lot of professors might believe their job is to teach the rules as they are because that is what most of their students will need to know on a day to day basis. I think this philosophy probabably varies a lot by professor. For example, Civil Procedure is often a fairly dry class that deals with things like statutes of limitation, standing, motions to dismiss, etc. I happened to take the class with a professor who had been involved in a case that helped get relief for Japanese-American folks that were sent to internment camps during WWII. He taught the basic rules, but he also spent a lot of time talking about some of thestructural barriers they faced and creative procedural arguments they had to make in order to get the case over the finish line. I’m sure there are some profs teaching this way almost everywhere, but it was kinda random luck that I happened to land in that particular class.
Which highlights exactly how the court should rule on this.
Take the most unfair gerrymandering case, rule it illegal, and then err on the side of “illegal” and place the onus on the drafters of maps to show its non-partisan. Make clear that non partisan lectoral Commissions meet the standard.
Like. “One party shouldn’t be able to exploit their power to fuck over the other group of voters” is a constitutional position that could be found in plenty of different ways. It’s not rocket science.
You Americans are weird.
EDIT. On the last comment, I’m constantly amazed by how many ways America has to fuck up problems that the rest of the world solved early last century. American exceptionalism!
Especially given it’s legitimately difficult to think of a single aspect of the US system that is superior to its counterparts in other countries. They lead in nothing.
And we got three amendments out of it. People don’t want to change things unless they feel irreparably broken. We are approaching critical mass. I’d just rather reach that point via an insurgency against a re-elected Biden rather than whatever we get with Trump because there’s a good chance that shit libs just roll over for Trump and let him do bad things instead of resisting.
Nothing getting released even though they have a million cases to release in the next 30 days has me convinced we are in for an apocalypse and they plan to dump them all at once to soften the blow to the court.
This is how it goes every year. They have 1 opinion day per week until they get into June and then they might start upping it to 2 days/week and potentially 3 towards the very end. They save most of the juicy ones for the end because they’re drama queens but the #1 rule is they don’t want to miss their summer vacations so they don’t let it linger into July.
