My Cato colleague Gene Healy points out that President Obama is the fourth chief executive who also taught constitutional law, joining William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton. “Taft did comparatively little damage, but the rest hardly inspire confidence that familiarity with constitutional scholarship encourages fidelity to the national charter.” [Washington Examiner] He lets me have a parting shot:

My Cato Institute colleague Walter Olson, author of “Schools for Misrule: Legal Academia and an Overlawyered America”, explains that “legal academia rewards cleverness in coming up with strained arguments for ideologically favored (or just expedient) positions; marginalizes as eccentric thinkers who favor original understanding as a guide” to the Constitution and often reduces law to “politics by other means.”

Unfortunately, that training has served Obama well.

Filed under: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, constitutional law, law schools