Despite my best intentions, I’m about to break the promise I made in my last post (and what better way to celebrate an election than by breaking a pre-election promise?).  I thought about whether I could do another Malcolm Gladwell post, based on his latest piece, but haven’t quite been able to find an angle on that that I like.  And so, it’s back to the judicial process.  I’ve posted a “tentative draft” of my course materials on SSRN.  As I note in the abstract, these materials are a work in progress, and are surely incomplete in many important respects.  I welcome all feedback concerning how they might be improved.

Cross posted at PrawfsBlawg.

The law school professor who most influenced me is Philip Frickey.

I didn’t take a course with Professor Frickey until I was a third-year student, but his thinking began to influence me, indirectly, during my first year, in the half-semester Legislation course that the University of Minnesota required me to take in the spring. My section of Legislation was taught by Jim Chen, then (the 1995-96 school year) a relatively new law professor, and now Dean of the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law. Professor Chen led my small section of students through discussion of what it means to interpret a statute, guided by Professors Eskridge and Frickey’s conception of the “funnel of abstraction” (the same funnel that now guides my own students in our discussions of how to interpret a statute).

Here is a weird alignment of the stars that – I swear – was completely unplanned. Responding to the call for a post on our most influential law professors, Professor Papke, who I think would proudly acknowledge his place on the left side of the playground, offered an obviously heartfelt homage to the conservative Robert Bork who he was lucky enough (I’m jealous) to have had for Constitutional Law.

I had Larry Tribe for Con Law, but, although I have great respect for him, he’s not the one that I want to remember here. No, even though I am hanging off the jungle gym on the right side of the lot (and we are quite happy to have concrete beneath us), I want to turn port way past Larry to the guy who, after reflection (and I came to this conclusion before David’s post), was the law professor who influenced me the most.