Law professors are censoring their own courses. Worse, they are operating on the theory that many twentysomething aspiring lawyers might have an acute psychiatric crisis upon learning about the history of America in the 1850s. As Harvard law professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen explains in the piece “The Importance of Teaching Dred Scott,” some law professors are now expurgating the actual history of America in order to spare the (speculative, potential) feelings of certain students.

One University at Buffalo law professor strenuously argued that teaching Dred Scott v. Sandford could be harmful, specifically in that it “‘gratuitously traumatizes’ readers.” In this Supreme Court case, a slave sued for his freedom, and the court ruled that, as a black man, he didn’t have the standing to sue in the first place. It’s an argument worth engaging with, if only because it is key to understanding American history and why the Civil War became necessary (or was always inevitable). Yet, a law professor charged with teaching this history to future lawyers and scholars believes assigning students the text is “asking them to relive the humiliation of [majority opinion author Chief Justice Roger] Taney’s language as evidence of his doctrine of white supremacy[.] The power of quotation marks is limited. How we experience [Dred Scott] is not how students do.”