"It was so draconian that it was difficult to enforce," Professor Freeman said.
"I recently went to a house tour where taking off your shoes was not only expected, it was enforced," the professor said.
While they are "arcane and rarely enforced," as Professor Gordon put it in an interview, the laws provide the states with a "symbolic power" of moral condemnation, as well as the prospect of actual punishment.
In an age of speech codes and rigidly enforced tolerance, a professor who trashed a student's religion would be brought up on charges and subjected to institutional ridicule.
Since the 1800s, the federal government has been in charge of controlling immigration and enforcing those laws, Professor Chemerinsky noted.
"We have a model for black coral developed in 1976, adopted as a state management plan and enforced by the government for 35 years," said Richard W. Grigg, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii.
The problem with the definition is that it unfairly conflates anti-Israel speech with anti-Semitic speech, in a way that, if enforced, would violate the free speech rights of students and professors.
Professor Goldberg said that sodomy laws, even if not often enforced, had the effect of labeling gays as "criminals who deserved unequal treatment".
"Ordinarily, you enforce your own rights," Professor Malveaux said.
"The liberal-activist model of the nineteen-sixties and nineteen-seventies said that the Supreme Court would declare that there are rights, and then order the political branches to enforce them," Jack Balkin, a professor at Yale Law School, told me.
