It was lonely being a Donald Trump supporter in the legal academy. Of my thousands of colleagues teaching law in this country, I don’t think more than a few dozen believed that he would have made a better president than Hillary Clinton, and not more than a handful of us were willing to go public with our support.
It has always been a risk to be a Republican teaching in a law school, where many teachers see a thin line between support for the GOP and bigotry or insanity. And yet, enough Americans liked what they saw in Trump to give him a smashing Electoral College victory.
How did it come about that law professors grew so out of touch with much of America?
To a hammer everything looks like a nail, and to a law professor everything is a problem in jurisprudence. Accordingly, it’s my guess that the legal academy, over the past 80 years or so, began to wander too far from common sense, or, to be more precise, to depart from the essentials of the rule of law. Law professors forgot the most important notion that undergirds our legal system — the basic principle endorsed by the framers, that ours is a government of laws, not men (or women).