Jaryn Crouson
A top public university’s law school is offering a class this fall that aims to explore the U.S.’ political shift towards “authoritarian Christianist nationalism” in the “age of Trump,” according to an email obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The University of Colorado Boulder’s Law School class, titled “Statutory Interpretation,” is offered to second-year law students and will hinge on topics of relevance in the current election season, including former president Donald Trump’s legal battles and the Supreme Court’s supposed “legitimacy crisis,” professor Paul Campos told students in an email obtained by DCNF. Campos noted in the email that the course could be more aptly named “The Crisis of the American Legal System in the Age of Trump.”
“[It] isn’t surprising that [the school would] offer such a course, but it is disappointing,” a law student who alerted the DCNF of the course said, mentioning multiple instances of similar bias experienced at the school. The student requested anonymity in order to “avoid retaliation” from the school.
“When I learned constitutional law, I learned it from a professor that openly called for the rewriting of the constitution. Students in that same class complained about the fact that “non-college educated” voters in rural America could affect elections at all,” the student told the DCNF. Professors at the university, he said, “tout the likes of Ginsburg and Sotomayor, reading their opinions as though it were gospel. I have yet to hear critiques on the liberal justices, but I often hear critiques on the likes of Justice Gorsuch, who once taught at the school.”
Course topics will include abortion and the “current legitimacy crisis” of the Supreme Court and will discuss how they create a “fundamental threat to social and political national stability,” according to the email.
The course will also examine “the extent to which the American legal and political systems are being pushed toward some variety of authoritarian Christianist nationalism, with potentially fascistic overtones” and “the perils of presidentialism.” Some of the required readings for the course include several books on fascism as well as Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2017 Atlantic article, The First White President, which attributes the election of Trump and other white presidents to the “bloody heirloom” of “whiteness.”
“It is absurd that a public university in this age would push the narrative that there is a secret cabal being pushed by members of a religion to overthrow the government,” the student said. “I’ve heard professors and students alike joke and insult Christianity for being backwards. It’s no wonder that someone is now teaching to fear it as a course.”
Campos, an ardent Trump critic, wrote in 2016 that the former president is a “total moron” who represents “every horrible personality trait and political instinct that fueled the Reagan revolution.” When then-president Trump was hospitalized briefly with COVID-19 in 2020, Campos wrote in a blog post that the president’s death would be a “blessed event,” saying, “I just want him to die,” according to Campus Reform.
The University of Colorado settled a lawsuit in February with Campos in which he received a six-figure payout, according to the Denver Post. Campos sued the university after he received a low annual review score, which he attributed to discrimination.
“The university is creating activists, soon to be sheathed in the power of the law,” the student warned. “Those activists are being taught to despise conservatives and view them as lessers through courses like this one.”
The university and Campos did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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