Field Guide to Criminal Law Professors

Since school is beginning again, I will serenade y’all with the Field Guide to Criminal Law Professors

The Rape-obsessed criminal law professor.  Every class will mention rape.  In his world, it is as if nobody has ever stolen anything or assaulted anyone.  His main goal in life is to get everyone to talk about rape.  He will ask everyone a question about it, and they literally get off getting everyone to say “coitus.”  Even with me, this gets old after about ten minutes, because his legal analysis of this rather shallow. (He can be beaten at his own game by inventing a fictitious sex act and trying getting to use such act as an example.)  Whatever the case, his obsession will annoy all of the feminists and people who think that they are MORE against rape than the next guy, and see the class as an opportunity to prove it.  This is his goal.  This is good for some laughs, because 1Ls, like Cindy McCain, need to feel they need to put on a show of being offended and angry.  Substantively, all the interesting questions about rape are the subject of splits between the states, and usually they don’t know about them.  This is left to actual lawyers, which the rape-obsessed professor never met.

There is more below the fold.

The conspiracy-obsessed criminal law professor. Conspiracy is one of those fairly broad crimes. Because it is so vague, whatever caselaw exists on it is somewhat nuanced. Typically, in a conspiracy case, the government seems to charge people with a crime where they don’t have proof that they committed every element but rather someone they hung out with did. So, the people that like to discuss conspiracy are usually former government lawyers who think that conspiracy is the coolest thing in the world, because it lets them put more people away. However, now that they no longer work for the government, they have to justify their actions. Unfortunately, insofar as criminal law goes, outside of large federal drug prosecutions, conspiracy is a pretty rare crime, because most police investigations focus on individuals, and turn up evidence that individuals committed some crime. Most prosecutors can charge people with the underlying crime. Sometimes this professor has mutated into a RICO-obsessed criminal law professor. Examples include Neal Katyal.  Of course, he now has street cred, because of his GTMO work.

The “attempt” obsessed criminal law professor. Attempt as a crime is fairly interesting. However, he quickly leaves the planet when he becomes obsessed with the notion of a substantial step.

The policy-obsessed criminal law professor. He doesn’t actually teach criminal law, but rather “policy.” He wants everyone to know that the goals of criminal law are deterrence, retribution, and a couple of other things. This is the extent of his knowledge of criminal law. In sixteen weeks you will know it all.

The wanna-be constitutional scholar professor. Nobody starts teaching at a law school to teach anything besides constitutional law. Even the patent and tax guys. However, there are only so many Con Law courses, so, people have to pretend that whatever they are teaching is constitutional law. This is can be interesting, but they have little interest in actually teaching the constitutional issues that DO come up in criminal proceedings, as most of them relate more to criminal procedure (i.e. searches and seizure, indictment, Miranda, etc.) then they do actual substantive criminal law. (Criminal procedure, as an elective is different.)