A Special Teacher

 Every now and then, a special teacher comes along.  A teacher who inspires his/her students.  Someone remarkable.

I just saw a post on LinkedIn, one of my law school professors has announced his retirement. I graduated from law school in 1984 (yes, I am old), and yet I remember Professor F’s class so well.

Professor F is an expert in Constitutional Law, more specifically, the First Amendment.  All second year law students were required to take a full year of Constitutional Law, and I was lucky enough to land in Professor F’s class.  

(That was also the year I was first introduced to the writings of Laurence Tribe, who teaches Constitutional Law at Harvard.  Professor Tribe taught Barack Obama, Ted Cruz, and John Roberts, among others.  These days I follow Tribe on Twitter. Read his tweets on the Alito abomination …)

There was a famous Supreme Court case, FCC v Pacifica Foundation, 438 US 726 (1978), in which the Supreme Court ruled that the FCC has the authority to regulate what broadcast television and radio stations may put on the air.   The case was decided when satellite radio did not exist and cable tv was in its infancy.  The Court held that regulating the public airwaves for decency was consistent with the First Amendment.

Very dry legal stuff, right?  Well, not after you hear what sparked the FCC to investigate Pacifica.

It was none other that George Carlin’s “Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Say on TV”.  Carlin initially recorded the bit before a live audience, and it appeared on his album Class Clown.  A radio station aired the entire 12 minute monologue one afternoon.  A father who was listening to the station with his son filed a complaint with the FCC, alleging that the monologue was obscene.

Well, Professor F told us that we could not truly understand the Court’s decision unless we knew exactly what was aired.  So he read the monologue to us.  The entire monologue.  All 12 minutes of Carlin’s brilliant social satire.  Every. Single. Word.

One of my classmates was so embarrassed by the monologue that she had to leave the room. Remember, we weren’t all watching cable tv and hanging out on Facebook back then, and people were not as free with profanity as they are now.  

The monologue and discussion were the highlight of the year.  Almost 40 years later I can hear Professor F’s voice as he reads the words. 

The world has changed.In fact, one of the words Carlin mentioned has, in fact, been used on TV, on Designing Women.

Enjoy your retirement, Professor.  You were an inspiration to us all.