“The people who taught us were all Warren court people,” said Pam Karlan, a constitutional and voting-rights expert at Stanford law school, referring to Chief Justice Earl Warren, who through the 1950s and 1960s led a court of both Democratic and Republican appointees to expand civil rights, equalize political representation and liberalize the criminal justice system.

Professor Kramer was the dean of Stanford law school at the time, and after the Heller ruling, he told me recently, “I couldn’t stand up in front of the class and pretend the students should take the court seriously in terms of legal analysis.” First-year law students, he felt, “should be taught by someone who still believed in what the court did.”