Law Professor Ordered Back In Classroom (Again)

Welcome back again, professor! As ridiculous as this law school professor censorship saga has been, it is a much better beat that following up on every time Amy Wax gets in trouble for saying stuff in class that could be mistaken for Kanye Twitter rants. But even good things must come to an end — another judge ordered Prof. Ken Levy of LSU Law back in class. Hopefully this will be the last time. The Advocate has coverage:

LSU must immediately allow law professor Ken Levy to return to teaching, and it’s barred from interfering with the professor’s employment and from violating his free speech and due process rights, East Baton Rouge Parish District Judge Tarvald Smith ruled Tuesday night.
…
“Your client should get back to the business of training lawyers and let professors teach, especially those that are tenured,” Smith told LSU’s attorneys from the bench.

While the admonition was directed at LSU’s attorneys, LSU’s president William Tate IV ought heed it too. As it turns out, he was the one who ordered the suspension! Getting into the weeds of the dispute revealed an issue that turned on whether Levy was forthright with Tate on what he said in class and if that specific conversation was clearly established as investigative. If Levy gave the gist of what he said during what he thought was a casual conversation whereas Tate wanted a verbatim retelling so that he could make a comparison with a classroom transcript, the two were having radically different conversations without knowing it. If that’s really what happened, this sounds like more of an administrative squabble than the “suspended for political speech” conflict this was marketed as, but I have a possible solution that could clarify the problem for everyone involved.

On the first day that Levy is back in his Administration of Criminal Justice course, all he has to do is pose a hypothetical. “Would Trump be able to delegate his pardon power to Elon Musk? Trump might have four more years left in his term but we all know that he’s really a sitting duck — Elon Musk is the one who’s really at the helm. If not, who would be there to stop Trump from doing it? If JD Vance and company’s attacks on judicial review pick up steam, there will be no real limits on how expanding Executive authority could impact criminal justice as we know it. Oh, and fuck not respecting the separation of powers for “criminal justice’s sake.” There you have it — a political question for his students that is pertinent to the course and the times, a question framed in a way that would likely piss off Republican gunners in his class so much that they go tattle, a script to make sure that there’s no ambiguity between Levy repeating what he said and what the class transcript says, and a little F bomb to boot! If he gets in trouble again after all of that, then we can squarely say that backlash was over his political statements. Your move, Levy.

Judge Orders LSU Professor Back Into Classroom; School President Says He Ordered Suspension [The Advocate]

Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who is learning to swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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