In my second semester of law school, just after the upheavals of 2020, I studied criminal law under a visiting professor whose progressive bona fides were stellar. She was a full-on prison abolitionist who had imbibed and presented for discussion every critical feminist and race theory imaginable. But she was a good teacher and maintained some degree of subtlety that passed for ideological neutrality in an institution where 90 percent of students and faculty agreed with her.
That subtlety transformed from virtue to vice, at least in my classmates’ eyes, when we turned to the subject of the law of rape. Many law schools have stopped teaching the subject altogether because, to borrow a phrase popular among administrators, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It’s uncomfortable at best and does not teach students any doctrines they couldn’t deduce from the study of other felonies. But seeking to give her class an appreciation for…
