This post has been republished from Professor Patricia McCoy’s Substack. Her new book, “Sharing Risk: The Path to Economic Well-Being for All,” is available from The University of California Press.

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A few years ago, I was doing research as a law professor at Boston College, and I stumbled across this disturbing fact: more than half of American households do not have enough income every month to pay their basic expenses. We’re not talking about small luxuries like dining out, going to the movies, or streaming services either. Instead, these families do not even have enough money to pay for their bare-bones essentials every month, including food, housing, and clothing. They are constantly juggling bills and robbing Peter to pay Paul. They cannot get ahead.

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This post is an edited version of Professor Kent Greenfield’s final lecture to this spring’s first-year constitutional law class. It was originally published in WBUR’s Cognoscenti.

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Today completes my 30th year teaching law. You’ve been wonderful this semester. Thank you.

But It has been a difficult time to teach constitutional law, and it must have been a difficult time to learn it. We are in a dangerous moment.

How do we make sense of the law right now? Of our profession?

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