The legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often referred to as ObamaCare, presented a perplexing outcome for many in the legal academy. As these challenges progressed through the courts, numerous leading law professors largely dismissed the arguments against the statute’s constitutionality as either frivolous or inconsequential. Despite this widespread consensus among scholars, these very arguments ultimately proved compelling to a substantial number of Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States.
As observed by David Hyman (citing Stephen Bainbridge), there was an almost universal rejection among law professors of the possibility that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) might be deemed unconstitutional. The fact that the ultimate judicial outcome diverged so sharply from the academic consensus raises a significant question: What accounts for the epic failure of law professors to accurately predict how Article III judges would interpret and rule on the case?
This essay, after considering potential justifications or defenses for these incorrect forecasts, identifies five factors that help illuminate the erroneous predictions made by some of the nation’s elite law professors. These predictions were, in the view of the observer, badly wrong, but never in doubt. This phenomenon warrants examination to understand the disconnect between academic legal analysis and the practical judicial application of constitutional law in high-stakes cases.
