Doug Spencer’s constitutional law courses will begin differently this fall than in years past.
The professor at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder plans to beef up lectures on current events, likely starting with the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity and a discussion of the legalities of presidential impeachment, all in hopes of providing a more foundational understanding of the current political climate.
“We’re in a constitutionally revolutionary moment where things are changing drastically,” he said.
Spencer has instructed students on the intricacies of long-established law and the thorough reasoning that guides Supreme Court decisions only to see a string of major, precedent-setting rulings overturned in the last few years, he said.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has recently struck down or altered foundational laws that have guided the nation for decades, including eliminating the federal right to an abortion with the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, weakening federal agencies’ power to interpret the law by overruling the Chevron decision last month, and by granting presidents broad immunity from criminal prosecution earlier this month.
How are law professors in Colorado taking on the task of educating the next generation of attorneys during unprecedented legal times?
Professors from Colorado’s two law schools, at CU Boulder and the University of Denver, told The Denver Post that’s the question buzzing around legal scholarship circles as everyone spends the summer preparing for a fall semester of uncertainty and learning on the fly.
“What foundational cases do we need to reconsider and how do we educate the next generation of lawyers to deal with a situation where the law seems to be shifting under their feet?” said Jonathan Skinner-Thompson, an associate law professor at CU’s Law School.
Rethinking curriculum
A new Supreme Court decision can cause major changes in certain areas of law, leading professors to scrap their syllabi and start again.
That’s always happened to some degree, said Kevin Lynch, the executive associate dean for academic affairs at DU’s Sturm College of Law.
But, he said, “There definitely is more of a sense this year that things are really changing a lot. The listserv of administrative law professors has been blowing up nonstop.”
Administrative law, which Lynch specializes in, is the law governing federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The precedent set by the Chevron decision in 1984 allowed the federal government to more easily regulate the environment, public health, workplace safety and consumer protections. It was overturned by the six conservative Supreme Court justices, with the three liberal justices dissenting.
Forty years ago, environmental groups brought a case to the Supreme Court challenging a Reagan administration effort to relax power plant and factory regulations. The Supreme Court ruled that judges should play a limited, deferential role when evaluating the actions of agency experts who interpreted ambiguous statutes.
In 2024, opponents of the Chevron decision argued it gave too much power to experts who work in the government instead of judges.
The political right has long been moving toward the idea that the administrative state shouldn’t exist, Lynch said.
“There’s a sense that we’re seeing the start of dismantling the administrative state,” Lynch said. “The idea is agencies shouldn’t be saying what the law is, Congress should be doing that. For those of us who favor a functional federal government that can solve problems, just saying, ‘Congress will figure it out and say what the rules are’ — we have a pretty dysfunctional Congress. That’s maybe where it’s headed. It’s pretty disheartening.”
The current court’s overruling of the Chevron case is expected to have large implications for the country; the Biden administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer warned it would be an “unwarranted shock to the legal system.” For law students, it means what they learned in administrative law classes last year is likely no longer accurate, Lynch said.
The class is important enough to be a DU law school requirement, he said.
“Will we still require it if the Supreme Court dismantles the administrative state and there are no longer agencies or they’re dramatically scaled back?” Lynch said. “That might require us to rethink broader curriculum.”
“Learning experience for us all”
For the upcoming semester, Skinner-Thompson — who teaches administrative law at CU, among other courses — said he and his students will be learning together. The Supreme Court’s decisions are sweeping and new. How they will play out in the everyday world is still unknown.
“I’m not going to have all the answers,” he said. “This will be a learning experience for us all.”
Instead of only focusing on teaching legal cases, Skinner-Thompson said it’s becoming increasingly important to educate students on the language and discourse around different facets of law.
For some students, Skinner-Thompson said that might look like understanding the conservative perspective versus the libertarian perspective versus the progressive perspective.
“We can teach them what the law says currently, but if they don’t understand the bigger philosophical debates happening, they’re not going to be able to anticipate the next big case,” he said.
Skinner-Thompson’s colleague Spencer agreed, noting that as politics are seen as increasingly driving Supreme Court decisions, there will have to be more of a focus on political education, too.
“They have to at least be aware of the argument that law is just whatever powerful people say it is,” Skinner-Thompson said. “I never want my students to be that cynical, but I think they need to understand that the law works to create a stable framework when political winds shift, and the counterargument is, do the political people just get to decide what the rules are all the time?”
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Skinner-Thompson feels empowered to help his students navigate a confusing legal world.
With Colorado’s bar exam scheduled for the end of July, the uncertainty and newness around the nation’s shifting legal framework can make students nervous.
In 2022, the National Conference of Bar Examiners announced students taking the bar exam would not be required to be familiar with that term’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions. In 2023, the conference explained how it develops questions for the bar exam — and how it can take up to three years.
Students are drawn to law school, Spencer said, because they see it as a place where there is a stability of ideas and a sense of power.
In this moment of ambiguity, Spencer said he hopes to help students make sense of the world around them.
In the long term, he said that it may be time to consider whether teaching constitutional law is something he wants to keep doing.
“This might be a little cynical, but it takes a lot of work and effort to track all of this,” Spencer said. “It’s disheartening as a scholar to say, ‘Here’s what the research says, but here’s a case that matters, and I can’t explain why (the Supreme Court) did it.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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