The TaxProf links to two articles about how great/terrible it is that Sen. Obama taught law school:

Kyron Huigens (Cardozo) published an op-ed on law.com today:  Barack Obama, Legal Scholar:

I think I know Obama’s mind. He’s like me — a legal scholar.

Obama is a graduate of one of the best law schools in the country and has taught on a part-time basis at one of the others. Every law school produces at least one scholarly journal, usually its flagship journal, that is edited by students. Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review, a political office of sorts that, nevertheless, gave him an opportunity to work with accomplished, often brilliant, scholars.

For a less flattering view, see Donald Kochan (Chapman), Obama’s Academic Credentials:

I do not dispute that he had a significant distinction teaching, as the University of Chicago recognizes.

But I think most academics expect people claiming to be academics (or former ones) to have some record of scholarship.

Are they serious?

Let’s take for a moment John Yoo and Jack Balkin. John Yoo is now a law professor. Jack Balkin is a law professor.

Here’s Jack Balkin on John Yoo’s prior work:

My own conclusion is that Yoo and Bybee did violate their professional obligations to the President as constitutional actor, and to the country as a whole. The reason is a combination of their outrageous theory of presidential dictatorship and their all too eager assistance in what appears to be a conspiracy to commit war crimes. 

Note how Balkin didn’t just conclude that Yoo had an erroneous interpretation of the law, but that Yoo had violated his professional duty in deliberately reaching a fallacious interpretation.

That’s a lot of room for disagreement between two law professors.

I wouldn’t say lawyers reflect the population as a whole, since they don’t, but, ideologically, the law takes all kinds. The fact that someone taught law school is, to be sure, a distinction about which they should be proud, but it doesn’t answer anything about how their mind works. Same goes for teaching without scholarship: as someone at a school like Chapman should know, the bulk of law professors have not spent their careers filling journals, that’s generally reserved for "the best" law schools.

They’ve spent them teaching. As they should.