Some years back, I was chatting with a friend (now a federal judge, thanks to W). He told me he was going to a legal judicial conference (he was a state court judge then). Knowing he was an ultra-right fellow, I smiled, and asked "Is it at the University of Chicago?" He chuckled and answered "No, but the whole faculty is from there."
Anyone who follows legal history knows the the UofC Law School, and in other disciplines as well (e.g. economics) are stains on the soul of humanity. The law school is the source of almost all that is bad about legal "scholarship" in the United States, if by scholarship one means "the ravings of lunatic lawyers in thrall to the right wing and corporations."
See, for example:
"My Alma Mater is a Moral Cesspool" Neo-Cons, Fundies, Feddies and the University of Chicago
"Chicago routinely trained me and numerous other students to become ruthless and unprincipled Machiavellians. That is precisely why so many neophyte Neo-con students gravitated towards the University of Chicago or towards Chicago Alumni at other universities. The University of Chicago became the "brains" behind the Bush Jr. Empire and his Ashcroft Police State. Attorney General John Ashcroft received his law degree from the University of Chicago in 1967. Many of his "lawyers" at the Department of Injustice are members of the right-wing, racist, bigoted, reactionary, and totalitarian Federalist Society (aka "Feddies"), which originated in part at the University of Chicago."
http://www.counterpunch.org/boyle08022003.htmlCon Law - What the University of Chicago right thinks of Obama.
"In the spring of 2000, not long after Barack Obama was trounced in the Democratic primary for a South Side Chicago congressional seat, Daniel Fischel staged an intervention. Meeting with Obama in the main lounge at the University of Chicago Law School, where Fischel was then dean and Obama was a part-time senior lecturer, Fischel offered Obama some unsolicited advice. "I told him that it was obvious his political career was going nowhere," Fischel recalls, "and that he really ought to think about doing something else."
The particular "something else" Fischel had in mind was a full-time tenured professorship; to sweeten the offer, Fischel said the law school would even hire Obama's wife, Michelle, to run its legal clinic. Although the move would require Obama to give up his state Senate seat, Fischel tried to convince his junior colleague that Chicago professor might be a more natural role than Chicago politician for a cerebral guy like him. "I mentioned people who'd been faculty members like
Scalia and Posner and Easterbrook and many others who had gone on to very distinguished careers outside of academia or in combination with academia," Fischel says. "I told him he could be a faculty member as well as a public intellectual."
*****
The University of Chicago Law School, after all, is a famously conservative institution--the birthplace of the law-and-economics movement and the incubator of numerous conservative intellectuals; Fischel himself literally wrote (with Easterbrook) one of the fundamental books on law and economics, in addition to another book arguing that the government's prosecution of Michael Milken was unjust. Yet, eight years ago, there was something about Obama that made Fischel and other Chicago conservative legal scholars want Obama to be their colleague--and today, at least for some of them, maybe even their president."
http://www.tnr.com/article/con-law
some alumni - people who came from the same environment as Professor Obama, and now his nominee, Ms Kagan:
-John Ashcroft: Former U.S. Senator, Governor of Missouri, and Attorney General of the United States
-Robert Bork: Former Solicitor General of the United States, acting Attorney General of the United States, and Judge on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court
-Elizabeth Cheney: head of the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group (ISOG) and daughter of former U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney
-Douglas H. Ginsburg: Chief Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit; unsuccessfully nominated to the Supreme Court
-Rex E. Lee: Former Solicitor General of the United States and President of Brigham Young University
-Michael W. McConnell: Judge on the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit
Jim Talent: Former U.S. Congressman and U.S. Senator from Missouri
I suggest we be very wary of folks who have been influenced by this University. I feel that many of Obama's policies, with which I disagree, were born when he was in this environment.
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