Anthony Scaramucci (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Anthony Scaramucci is more than just investment firms, profanity, and bizarre Celebrity Big Brother appearances. The Mooch may only have spent 10 days as White House Director of Communications, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t left his mark — he’s even got a new book out called “Trump: The Blue Collar President,” to capitalize on his moment in the public eye. Towards that end, The Mooch has a new interview in Coverage Opinions where he throws down some Commerce Clause knowledge, reminisces about his paper route, and starts some beef with Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe.
It took Scaramucci three times to pass the bar exam, and he’s never actually practiced law, instead starting his career at Goldman Sachs. But interviewer Randy Maniloff still took the opportunity to quiz him on the Commerce Clause, and came away impressed with his knowledge:
“What’s the Commerce Clause?,” I ask the former Constitutional law expert. I was thinking I might get hopeless equivocation. After all, it’s been a very long time. I had to look it up myself on Wikipedia. But Scaramucci didn’t need a lifeline. He dove into a lengthy lecture of the Constitutional provision, followed by its impact on national economics, and concluding with a study of Russian versus Western economics. Hmmm, quite a few good points, I’m left thinking. It’s hard to believe the guy needed three tries to pass the bar exam.
He also says his experience of delivering Newsday and his efforts to expand the customer base led to his lifelong passion for entrepreneurship:
Such entrepreneurship led Scaramucci to grow his paper route into the largest in town. But it offered more than just some money: “There was no better feeling than converting one of these people into a first time customer. . . . I loved the sense of pride I felt in building something. Of hustling day-in and day-out to earn my keep. Of being my own boss.”
And The Mooch also mouths off about his law school grades. He received an A- in Constitutional Law and he’s pretty convinced he found a hack to getting good grades in the class, well, as long as noted constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe is teaching the class:
“What does Larry want to hear?,” Anthony Scaramucci had asked himself. He’s explaining to me his final exam strategy that led to an A- in Laurence Tribe’s Constitutional Law class. “He wants to hear left-leaning judicial activism. So I wrote left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths.”
But just parroting back some partisan line without any actual constitutional analysis seems like a pretty poor way to master Con Law. And, it turns out Larry Tribe has a very different take on how he grades exams, and he’s studied the grading patterns to prove it:
“Mr. Scaramucci is making things up if he says what you quote him as saying. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I studied my grading patterns carefully to see whether there was any correlation between the ideological slant of a student’s answer (to the extent any such slant was evident in what the student wrote) and how high a grade I awarded and found that there was none at all. That’s why right-leaning students of mine like Ted Cruz tended to do every bit as well on my blindly graded exams as did more liberal students like Barack Obama. An exam filled with what Anthony Scaramucci told you was ‘left-leaning judicial activism and tons of pablum and liberal shibboleths’ wouldn’t have received a grade as high as an A-, and exams that did a good job explicating an originalist position would’ve received very high grades. More to the point, my exams always emphasized technical mastery of Supreme Court doctrine and left little or no room for ideological posturing.”
More than anything this seems to demonstrate the gap between students’ and professors’ perception of exams. It turns out the real way to hack a law school exam is to learn something about the subject. That sneaky Mooch!
Anthony Scaramucci On How To Get An A- In Law School curated from Above the Law
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