Legal Commentary

Most readers will know this already, but for those who don't, here's a little inside information about the terminology we law prawfessors use in our day to day lives: we use the word package to refer to the set of classes that we are teaching or will teach in any given year.  So, for example, the associate dean might say to a professor: What package are you looking for next year?  Or during an interview, the appointments chair might ask a candidate: What's your ideal package?  Or a disaffected faculty member might complain over drinks with a colleague: God, I hate this place.  I have such a crappy package!

I have a couple of questions about this package thing.  First, can't we come up with some other word for it?  I don't know, maybe I'm just too sensitive about irritating-sounding words.  For example, in the book I just finished writing, I tried to replace the word scrutiny, which I hate, with the word fluffernutter, which is fun, everytime I had to talk about free exercise doctrine.  My editor, however, got a massive migraine reading the thing and made me change it back.  (oops: pointless and gratuitous link to my blog about my book).  I hate using the word package to refer to my courses.  Does anyone have a better word?  I don't, really, but for better or worse, I'll just use the word shmackage, as in package-shmackage, for the rest of this post.

My other, slightly more serious, question is: Does anyone have a particularly interesting shmackage that they'd like to share?  Like, one that is completely different from the shmackage that you had or thought you were going to have when you started teaching?  Or one that appears to be completely incoherent but really isn't?  My shmackage this year is environmental law, intro to US law for LLMs, and the first amendment.  Though my shmackage differs from year to year, it usually has some combination of environmental law and first amendment/church-state law.  These areas of law intersect a little here and there, but basically they are completely separate and entirely different.  I love teaching both of them, though, and I'm glad they're both part of my shmackage.  One thing I like about the shamckage is that with first amendment law I get to talk about abstract principles and the framers and ultimate reality, etc. etc., and with environmental law I get to indulge the lawyer geek in me and talk about section 9479-B-3-little c-romanette iii, and fun stuff like that. 

Lastly, does the fact that many prawfs might end up with either unexpected or incoherent shmackages shed any light on whether we should be making such a big deal during the appointments process for entry-levels on what their ideal shmackages are?  When I was on the market and someone asked me about my ideal shmackage, I always felt like saying that my ideal shmackage was whatever shmackage would be most likely to get me the job.