Peterr at Firedoglake details how difficult it is to be a popular professor of constitutional law at the start of a new semester, if your name happens to be Dawn Johnsen:
Life must be hell for not just Dawn Johnsen but also her Dean, Lauren Robel, and the students at IU’s Maurer School of Law. Johnsen was announced as Obama’s nominee to be head of the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel on January 5, 2009, and since then she has waited.
On Christmas Eve, the GOP refused a unanimous consent request to allow her nomination to be carried over into 2010 (see bmaz for a post-mortem on the nomination), and so Obama is forced to renominate her if he still wants her as part of his administration. David Dayen reports that Obama intends to do just that, once the Senate reconvenes later this month. But all that does is re-start the confirmation process.
So she continues to wait.
Meanwhile, life goes on at Maurer.
Johnsen is still on the faculty, but if you are her dean, do you schedule her to teach? If so, what classes? If not, how else can you use her talents? When students sign up for her courses, what happens if she suddenly gets confirmed? If you are a student, do you sign up for her class only to have it canceled, and then it’s too late to get into another good course that filled up because you signed up for Johnsen’s?
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