"[A]fter the flurry of hard-right rulings this June, many professors had their 'own personal grieving period.'"

"But they quickly turned toward 'grappling with how we teach our students' to understand the Supreme Court’s reactionary turn.... A professor must say what the court claims it’s doing, then explain what it is actually doing, which is often something completely different. This technique can disillusion students, leading them to ask why they’re bothering to learn rules that can change at any moment.... Students confront a legal system in a crisis of legitimacy led by an extreme and arrogant court. Still, they must slog on, most gathering substantial debt as they go, pretending that 'law' is something different from politics, a higher realm of reason and rationality where the best arguments prevail.... My father, Nat Stern, retired from a 41-year career at Florida State University College of Law in May.... When I asked him why he decided to retire, he told me that he had no desire to explain the Supreme Court’s conservative revolution as the product of law and reason rather than politics and power.... 'For the bulk of my career,' he said, 'I’ve felt I could fairly explain rulings and opinions that I don’t endorse because they rested on coherent and plausible—if to me unconvincing—grounds. In recent years, though, I’ve increasingly struggled to present new holdings as the product of dispassionate legal reasoning rather than personal agendas.'"

Writes Mark Joseph Stern in "The Supreme Court Is Blowing Up Law School, Too/Inside the growing furor among professors who have had enough" (Slate). 

I got there via David Bernstein at Instapundit, who says: "We all know that left-learning lawprofs would be dancing in the streets if SCOTUS were equally aggressive to the left. And indeed, while Stern portrays discontent with the Court as a question of professional standards rather than ideology, he does not manage to find a single right-leaning professor to quote in his article."

I remember just before the 2016 election, when I was making my decision to retire.

I believed Hillary Clinton would be the next President and would fill the seat vacated by Scalia and give the Court a 5-person liberal majority. As I was teaching Constitutional Law for the last time, I noticed so many details about federalism and separation of powers that I'd been struggling to understand and explain for the last 30+ years that were about to be flattened into pat, ideological answers.

Ironically, that was a vision of a return to what I had learned in law school. (I graduated in 1981.) I taught law school from 1984 to 2016, and the entire time, there was a fascinating dynamic on the Court — with a left and a right side and swing voters to keep things mysterious. A balance like that could happen again and give lawprofs something more to chew on, but as Bernstein notes, what most lawprofs want, I believe, is the Court I imagined before the 2016 election. I wasn't a typical law professor. I wanted the material to be challenging and interesting. But for most lawprofs, that's second-best. A solidly, predictably liberal Court is preferable. They'd still have something to talk about: how to go even more imaginatively far to the left.