How do lawprofs know when they are caving to the feminist activists?

Harvard lawprof Jeannie Suk has an article in The New Yorker called "The Trouble with Teaching Rape." This struck me especially hard because the other day, when I was cleaning out my office, I encountered a folder of notes written 24 years ago, when I taught a law school seminar on rape. ("You're teaching a whole seminar on rape?" That's the first line of the notes.) I'd just read these notes last night — after not looking at them for more than 20 years — so it was interesting to see how different everything was back then and whether my attitude had changed.

I was teaching a seminar on rape because I was immersed in a writing project that had grown out of my experience teaching Evidence. All the evidence casebooks have a section on the "rape shield rule," which limits inquiry into the alleged victim's "other sexual behavior." (This project became "The Lying Woman, The Devious Prostitute, and Other Stories from the Evidence Casebook,” 88 Northwestern Law Review 914 (1994).") If you taught Evidence, you'd have to go out of your way to avoid rape, and the books — highlighting the threat to the criminal defendant's rights — presented the women as liars. 

Professor Suk teaches Criminal Law (not Evidence), so the subject is less about who's telling the truth and more about the act and the state of mind that constitute a crime.  She reports that the teaching "environment" has changed in "the past couple of years" and students "seem more anxious... about approaching the law of sexual violence."

When I teach rape law... I focus on cases that test the limits of the rules.... We ask questions like: How should consent or non-consent be communicated? Should it matter whether the accused realized that the complainant felt coerced? What information about the accused and the complainant is relevant to whether or not they should be believed? How does social inequality inform how we evaluate whether a particular incident was a crime? I often assign students roles in which they have to argue a side—defense or prosecution—with which they might disagree.

These pedagogical tactics are common to almost every law-school topic and classroom. But asking students to challenge each other in discussions of rape law has become so difficult that teachers are starting to give up on the subject. 

Suk doesn't say whether she's had difficulty. She shifts from describing what sounds like her own stellar teaching to references to generic teachers who somehow just can't hack it anymore. Exactly what is happening in those classes? I'd like to hear something specific. Maybe those professors who are giving up never did a very good job with the topic, the students are speaking up about the professors' fumbling, and those professors jumping at the chance to skip the topic altogether.

When I went to law school, more than 30 years ago, the substantive criminal law class didn't focus on any particular crimes. We spent the whole semester on actus reus, mens rea, and a few defenses (like impossibility). There was a section of the book on particular crimes, and we might have dipped into murder and theft, but that was the kind of material you could learn quickly in your bar review course. It wasn't the meat of criminal law. I think if you go back and figure out the history, rape got into the criminal law course because law professors caved to the political argument that not to teach it was to say that it's not important.

That was never true, and if the activists demand that rape be taken out and the professors cave, they are, ironically, paradoxically, uncaving.