The decline of the University of Minnesota Law School is only a small part of a much larger story and of limited interest at that, but it is my alma mater and traditionally a beneficiary of state funding as part of a public university.
I found evidence of rot at the law school in a Zoom webinar promoted in the law school’s recent email newsletter and wrote to Associate Dean for Academic Affairs William McGeveran to follow up. The law school has posted the Zoom webinar here on YouTube. I posted the text of my message here (no response as yet) on Power Line.
Moderated by Dean McGeveran, the webinar featured four of the law school’s professors bashing Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs case. They came at it from a variety of approaches, all hostile to the draft opinion.
Meaning no disrespect to any of the four, I think it is fair to say that Jill Hasday was the star of the show. Her faculty profile is posted here. In her comments Professor Hasday rehearsed points she made in her May 9 Washington Post op-ed column “On Roe, Alito cites a judge who treated women as witches and property.”
Now comes Richard Doerflinger. Doerflinger subjects Professor Hasday’s Washington Post column to critical scrutiny in his Public Discourse column “Women, Witches, and Abortion: A Misguided Attack on Justice Alito.”.
As it was, the uniformity of opinion in the webinar made it a crashing bore. Doerflinger would have set a few sparks flying. I found the uniformity of opinion in the webinar reflective of the sad condition of the law school. The missing sparks do likewise. Doerflinger’s column is illustrative of the dog that didn’t bark, to borrow the famous clue from the classic Sherlock Holmes story.
Courtesy of Mark Pulliam.
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