When I agreed to return to UConn Law to teach a first-year course on legal analysis and writing a few months ago I had no idea how my semester would collide with the Kavanaugh nomination. When I planned my semester, one of my first tasks was to find a case to use for the first class or two to illustrate the role of courts in shaping both law and society.

We always used fun cases for these classes, such as when the real George Costanza sued Jerry Seinfeld for ruining his life. (181 Misc.2d 562, 693 N.Y.S.2d 897 (1999).) (Seinfeld won.) I had no idea that Kennedy was going to retire at that point, but the Gorsuch nomination was fresh enough that I figured a stare decisis case might be a good way to link legal analysis with current events, and so I decided to use Lawrence v. Texas, the 2002 case overturning the Texas ban on homosexual sodomy, reversing 14-year-old SCOTUS authority from a case called Bowers v. Hardwick.