Jesse Wegman has a column in today's New York Times on "the crisis in teaching constitutional law." It is remarkably similar to a piece Mark Joseph Stern published in October 2022. Both quote an array of mostly liberal and progressive constitutional law professors arguing that the Supreme Court is changing too much, too quickly. Perhaps the purest expression of this view comes from Barry Friedman in Wegman's piece today:
Even more troubling than the court’s radical rulings, from a teacher’s perspective, is the rapid and often unprincipled manner in which the justices reach them.
“What feels different at this moment is the ambition and the velocity, how fast and aggressively it’s happening,” said Barry Friedman, a longtime N.Y.U. law professor and co-author of a book on judicial decisionmaking.
What should we make of this "too much, too quickly" critique of the Court? Is it simply sour grapes from the Court's liberal and progressive critics, as Jonathan Adler and others have argued? Or an example of the "good old days" fallacy, as Gerard Magliocca suggests in a characteristically pithy post this morning? Or is there something more to it?
I try to answer these questions in a new paper.