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"Senator Feingold joins Marquette Law School with a substantial academic, legal and legislative background."

"He will draw on all of this in working with students in their analysis of some of the most complex legal issues facing our nation and world today. I look forward to his service on our faculty."

His course: Current Legal Issues: The U.S. Senate.

What current U.S. Senate legal issues would you put in a law school course? Perhaps something about the way the Senate takes account of constitutional values like federalism and individual rights and why that does (or doesn't) deserve deference from the judiciary?

ADDED: In 2005, Feingold gave a lecture at my law school called "Upholding an Oath to the Constitution: A Legislator's Responsibilities." (Coincidentally, we're talking about the congressional oath today on this blog.) In my 2005 post on the lecture, I said:

Russ Feingold spoke about his devotion to the oath he took as a senator to uphold the Constitution and the second oath he took for the Clinton impeachment trial. Feingold was the only Democratic senator to vote against the motion to dismiss the impeachment. He applied a legal standard to the motion and had to vote the way he did because he could not say that there was no chance of proving the charges against the President....

Feingold talked about his campaign finance reform law, which he cared about because he was "tired" of hearing that politics was "about money, not ideas." He reminisced about the court case, challenging the constitutionality of the law, and described sitting through a nine-hour deposition conducted by the great First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams. Abrams began his questioning praising Feingold to his face for his reputation for upholding the Constitution. As Feingold put it later in the question session, Abrams spent the nine hours "trying to confuse me." I'd say the praise that he started off with was a deliberate effort to unnerve the senator. Feingold could hold his ground, he thought, because he believed his position was consistent with his oath to protect the Constitution, because "we spent a great deal of time crafting that bill" to avoid constitutional violations....

He spoke about the Patriot Act and his anguish at the speed with which it was pushed through the Senate, beginning with a closed door hearing on October 3, 2001.... Feingold objected to this sort of "legislation on the fly." Many members of Congress admitted to him that they had not read the text of the Patriot Act....

Ahem. Health care. Ahem.

... He ended his speech with the observation that it has been complex to keep his oath to uphold the Constitution and that he has "struggled constantly to get it right."...

I would never have said this out loud, but I couldn't help thinking how interesting it was that Feingold shaped his whole lecture around the sanctity of the oath, when just a few days ago he announced that he was getting a divorce, his second. Was I the only one who thought how strange it was to hear a man piously invoke a passionate fidelity to an oath when he had -- so conspicuously -- gone back on the marriage oath twice?

Full post as published by Althouse on January 05, 2011 (boomark / email).