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, with a focus on political theory, American government, and public law. I graduated from 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 practical background, I have taught various business law subject, but my passion has always been with constitutional law, legal history, and jurisprudence.

I taught those subjects in one form or another since I was a graduate student, until an administrative decision made by the school during the heated political temperature of 2020-2022 moved me into a different subject. My views about the nature and purpose of law, my philosophical leanings, and my teaching of constitutional law as informed by the Supreme Court 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 dominate the faculty lounges of 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 stood during the blog’s prior iteration, they have deteriorated alarmingly since. It goes without saying, that the views expressed here are my own and not those of the administration or faculty of my law school, at least not ones they would acknowledge above whispered tones.