Fun and games with Professor LLamabutcher

This morning in Legal Theory and Public Policy, we were doing Lon Fuller's The Morality of Law, and to illuminate Fuller's distinction between morality of duty and morality of aspiration I used a series of Johnny Cash lyrics, which somehow got across the whole issue of morality of duty being tied to the acceptance of consequences of actions versus the morality of aspiration's desire for righteousness, tying the whole thing together with Lincoln's Second Inaugural address.

This afternoon in Civil Liberties we did The Prize Cases, juxtaposing Justice Greer's assertion of presidential authority with the Carter-esque position of Justices Nelson and Taney in their extreme hobbling of the presidency, noting that had Nelson and Taney gotten a fifth vote the decision would have been ignored, as was Merryman. We played with the problem of the Emmancipation Proclamation last week as justified by the president's war-time authority--that was a lot of fun.

For their first moot court I am really playing with the idea of doing something based on the recent Cartoon War Riots: creating a scenario where a group of Muslim students on a college campus burn a Norwegian and a Danish flag, and are arrested for violating the ban on cross-burning. Kind of a RAV v. St Paul meets Texas v. Johnson in a post-modern melange of PC tuna melt.

Image shamelessly stolen from Everyone's Favorite Commie.