"But she found the Party of the Right students compassionate, intellectual and not terribly exercised about her homosexuality."

"She was drawn to the Catholics among them, who corrected her misimpression that the existence of sin 'means you are bad.' It means 'precisely the opposite,' they taught her. 'It means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved,' she says."

The NYT has an article about Eve Tushnet, the daughter of lefty lawprof Mark Tushnet. As a Yale student, she first attended a meeting of the conservative group "specifically to laugh at them, to see the zoo animals." Now, she advises individuals with a homosexual orientation to abstain from sex.

As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.

That blog has been on my blogroll for a long time. Her father, now a Harvard lawprof, is one of the many former Wisconsin lawprofs who are out there at other law schools carrying on what people here like to think of as the Wisconsin tradition.

Her father, a nonobservant Jew, and her mother, a Unitarian, both belonged to progressive traditions, tolerant of her sexuality.

Eve became a Catholic in her sophomore year at Yale.

[S]ince 2002 she has made a meager living through writing, computer programming and freelance research. She lives in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of downtown Washington and volunteers two hours a week at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center.

ADDED: Queerty says:

Tushnet's website receives "hundreds" of visits per day — hardly enough to call her an influential blogger. But that reach comes through her scribblings for magazines like the National Review, titles that are apt to give space to people "on the inside" of gays advocating against them. Her writings are interesting, we'll give her that; ex-gays! sublimation vs. repression! And so is her story.... But she is a person with a platform who is out harming human beings with her instruction, and that's simply unacceptable.

Has Obama failed to nominate a strongly liberal Supreme Court Justice because of the insufficient supply of liberal law professors?

Recounting the history of Harvard's struggle with Critical Legal Studies in the 1980s and the "postradical" period that followed, lawprof David Fontana writes:

The stories of the postradical generation are not only of intellectual interest but also affect the future of American government. Obama has been criticized by many for not nominating enough theoretically ambitious and bold liberals to the federal courts. Part of the reason for that dynamic, however, has less to do with politics than with the supply of such theoretically ambitious liberals—particularly law professors.

Many of the more-radical jurisprudential movements from the earlier generations have succeeded in opening eyes to the flaws in the legal system, but beyond that have largely disappeared. The Old Left efforts to push courts to be more aggressively liberal floundered after years of courts dominated by Republican appointees. The New Left efforts by the critical-legal-studies movement and others floundered, in part because, like with the Old Left, their ideas were met with sustained resistance from the elite institutions of the legal system.

Spare me! There are plenty of strongly liberal and lefty lawprofs and if you want theoretical ambition you can find it. The reason these folks don't get nominated to the Supreme Court is crushingly obviously because they'd be soundly rejected by the American people and borked in the Senate.

The country has moved to the right, so there are fewer law professors who are truly liberals. 

Yeah, there's a little balance now. I can imagine what "truly liberal" means to Fontana. I think they're nearly all liberal from the standard that prevails among American voters, but that's not truly liberal.

Many of those on the left today are simply trying to maintain older decisions... Others on the left, who once might have aggressively pursued liberal legal ideas, are now increasingly writing about law from a more theoretical or quantitative, and therefore less practical, perspective—making their writing less related to the issues judges decide and making them less obviously candidates for future judgeships.

And some on the left who write more directly about cases and courts, like Tushnet or Dean Larry Kramer of Stanford Law School, and Dean Robert C. Post of Yale Law School, are now increasingly members of the "popular constitutionalism" movement, who believe that courts should be stripped of all or most of their decisional powers—hardly the prejudicial profile that one wants.

"Prejudicial"? I know what he meant to say but... what a hilarious word!

Anyway, yes, many brilliant liberal/lefty lawprofs have applied their minds to generating arguments for why courts shouldn't enforce rights, but I think the reason they have gone in that direction is that they have perceived that it is the most effective way to push back against the conservative and liberal-but-not-truly-liberal jurists who get appointed to the Supreme Court. The "popular constitutionalism" movement is further evidence that the American people have a pretty conservative view of what judges should do and how the Constitution should be interpreted. And that's why the nominees aren't "theoretically ambitious and bold liberals."

Lawprof Mark Tushnet "wants [the Supreme Court] to be slackers."

He's referring to the current Supreme Court, which he doesn't like, so he's happy with them cranking out fewer cases. The ideal number would be 0, he snarks, here at the judicial review symposium.  It's the last panel of the day.

Lawprof Nelson Lund has just spoken, condemning the "cult of celebrity judges." Is there a cult of celebrity judges? If so, is it a bad thing? Anyway, Lund has a bunch of proposals designed to destroy the cult. Make the job of being a Supreme Court Justice more onerous and less nourishing of narcissism, and maybe the Justices will become dourly dutiful little scribes.

One proposal is to end the practice of signing opinions. Do you think if the Justices couldn't stamp their names on the opinions, their behavior would change? And would unsigned opinions even hide who the author really was?

Prof. Tushnet says:

"You're going to have to figure out how to keep Justice Ginsburg from using the word 'pathbreaking,' and you're going to have to keep Justice Scalia... well, from being Justice Scalia."

Ha ha. It would give us lawprofs a new game to play, figuring out the distinctive marks of the different judges. For a while, at least. Over time, I think, we'd stop caring who was who. The Court would fade into a black box from which opinions emerged, and we'd judge the opinions on their merit, without bothering to imagine what's going on in the minds of particular judges. Would that make law more law-like, or would it just hide things that we ought to want to know?