I can’t…I just can’t…

Con Law students at the University of Texas sat down for Professor Richard Albert’s 1L exam and were met with a bunch of multiple choice questions and one essay question, asking students to imagine themselves as counsel to the Governor of Kansas in 1954 and write 1000 words outlining the best legal arguments to defend segregation in the Brown case.

Defending… segregation.

*snip*

Conservative blog Misrule of Law, in trying to defend the professor’s question, characterizes this exam as teaching students to “think like a lawyer.” This may be a perfectly noble sentiment, but it’s a red herring — this question doesn’t teach a law student to think like a lawyer any more than asking a student how they would balance the humors would teach someone to “think like a doctor.” Even if we pretend there’s a good argument against the holding in Brown — like Trump’s judicial nominees do (but don’t ask them about it or it hurts their precious feelings!) — what value does a student get from cobbling together legal precedent as it stood in 1954? That doesn’t make for an interesting debate, it’s just dumb.

abovethelaw.com

I took Con Law over 30 years ago, so 30+ years closer to Brown v Board of Education and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the Plessy line of cases were. Because they’d been overruled, and Brown was only finishing up what had been done in Sweatt v Painter (1950) which held that UT Austin coukdn’t set up a separate but equal law school.

I would have been bewildered in 1987 if presented with this exam. In 2018, faced with judges who won’t say if the would uphold Brown, I would have been livid. I might even have protested the exam or written something completely different.

I am utterly gobsmacked.

ETA this is a conservative black man, on top of it all.