Spring 2022 Course Evaluations

bellicosity among my classmates. Statistics 100 tells you that you’ll get a roughly normal distribution so long as you are looking at a simple random sample. Our 100 person section, though not random, is large and representative enough to ensure that at least ONE person was slightly right of center, pro-life, and perhaps a fan, or if not a fan, respectful of, sitting conservative supreme court justices. I was actually taken aback by the casualness with which Prof. Pokorak made an implicit "Uncle Tom" joke about Justice Thomas. But because of Prof. Pokorak’s early, tacit green-lighting of progressive political lecturing, some of my peers found it appropriate to "speak for the class" in asserting X,Y, or Z. It’s truly a fascinating phenomenon, the phenomenon of a group’s emboldening as they realize they have an authority figure behind them. It’s no stretch to my mind to think that had someone said something politically heterodox in Prof. Pokorak’s progressive salon of sorts that he would have teamed up with a hypothetically bellicose peer in making fun of the dissenter. An echo chamber produces lame, lazy arguments. And as someone who identifies as a political nomad, not falling squarely in any neat category, I can tell you that not only were we not learning con law, but folks weren’t honing sharp political opinions either. When responding "why is this a form of unconstitutional discrimination" is met with a student answer "because it’s America," which in turn is met with a fist bump from the Professor, one momentarily forgets one is in a reputable law school class. Professor Pokorak: I think I understand the rationale behind devoting about half of each class to constitutional law and the other half to current events- current events are more exciting, more dynamic, etc., and your perspective on them is valuable- but this is the only 1L constitutional law class any of us will ever take. It’s an incredibly important topic that will be relevant to us for the rest of our lives. Please consider spending the whole course on teaching students about constitutional law in future. That’s what we’re paying for and it’s information that’s crucial to our development as law students and lawyers. Also, though no one really spoke up about it in class, we were very frustrated with the midterm- not just the typos, but the lack of correspondence between what we’d studied and what we were tested on. (More importantly than any of that, I know you had a hard semester on a personal level and I hope everything resolves as positively as possible! Wishing you all the best.) I really like Professor Pokorak’s instruction. I think that maybe the discussions could be a bit more focused though.

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