Professor Louis

I’ve said on numerous occasions of one professor or another at Our Law School, that he/she is a good person, but a terrible professor. This semester, I’ve had the distinct displeasure of experiencing the opposite: Professor Louis. A typical remark of his? “Divorce is expensive because it’s worth it.” Or how about “You must develop more devious minds”. And this is the man who not only teaches us Family Law, but also runs one of our clinics. He yells and has a very harsh speaking voice—very reminiscent of the old school tent revival preacher. Yes, the room is large and full of people, but there are microphones available for your use—nice, wireless ones. These will allow you to project your voice without needing to resort to this unpleasant vocal technique. But that’s not what gives me conniptions about him.

Professor Louis doesn’t like poor people.

It took me awhile to put a finger on this, but there it is. He makes small remarks in class on a continuous basis about money and how people spend it that are, taken individually, mildly annoying. Taken as a whole, they’re really quite offensive. It seems to me that he blames the poor for being poor. After all, they should just pull themselves up by their boot straps and get on with it, right? I wish that I had realized what exactly it was that was causing me such pain in his lectures earlier in the semester, so that I might have collected some specific examples of this.

I also hate that he tells stories and tries to act like they’re news items, gospel truth. Almost every class begins with me trying to suppress the urge to yell “Cite, please!” at him as he regales us with such gems as “A duck’s quack doesn’t echo”. He whines endlessly about how far behind we’ve gotten in the syllabus and keeps us late after every class. It makes me want to scream “If you would stick to the matter at hand, we wouldn’t BE this far behind!”