Stanford Law School Replaces Yale as No. 1....

....for caving in to Brownshirts

Yesterday, Stanford Law School hosted — and I use that word advisedly, as you’ll see — a Federalist Society event featuring what was supposed to be a talk by United States Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan. The subject was to be, “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” Kind of sounds like something curious law students might like to hear, yes?

As David Lat tells us in his comprehensive report:

Leading up to the event, Russo Commons took on a festive air. Stanford’s OutLaw and National Lawyers Guild chapters served Mexican food to protesters, some of whom had their faces painted. Colorful signs were everywhere. A dog decorated with a transgender flag was running around. It felt like an eagerly anticipated social occasion, one FedSoc member told me.

OK, so far so good. Street theater has a long tradition in social protest.

Then the event got underway. Approximately 100 protesters lined up outside the event to boo those who entered, with some students calling out individual classmates—e.g., “Shame, John Smith”—à la Cersei’s Walk of Atonement on Game of Thrones. Another 50 to 70 students came into the room where the event took place, compared to about 20 FedSoc students (if that). The protesters carried signs reading "RESPECT TRANS RIGHTS," "FEDSUCK," "BE PRONOUN NOT PRO-BIGOT," and "JUDGE DUNCAN CAN'T FIND THE CLIT" (among others), along with trans-rights flags.

Arguably still OK. Protest signs, even when vulgar, are part of the deal with free speech. Still, calling out classmates by name seems dicey to me.

When the Stanford FedSoc president (an openly gay man) opened the proceedings, he was jeered between sentences. Judge Duncan then took the stage—and from the beginning of his speech, the protestors booed and heckled continually. For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him, with exclamations like "You couldn't get into Stanford!"

Fifty years ago, they let in some hayseed from North Carolina, so I have to think Judge Duncan could have made the cut.

"You're not welcome here, we hate you!" "Why do you hate black people?!" "Leave and never come back!" "We hate FedSoc students, f**k them, they don't belong here either!" and "We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!"

The little snowflakes are having a tantrum. These are the people advertised as “tomorrow’s leaders.” If America’s luck hits the ocean floor, they will be.

But the more pressing problem is with today’s leaders, like the upper echelon of Stanford Law School (emphasis added).

Throughout this heckling, Associate Dean [for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Tirien] Steinbach and the University's student-relations representative—who were in attendance throughout the event, along with a few other administrators (five in total, per Ed Whelan)—did nothing. FedSoc members had discussed possible disruption with the student-relations rep before the event, and he said he would issue warnings to those who yelled at the speaker, but only if the yelling disrupted the flow of the event. Despite the difficulty that Judge Duncan was having in giving his remarks, plus the fact that many students were struggling to hear him, no action was taken.

Despite the difficulty that Jewish citizens were having walking the streets without getting menaced by young men in brown shirts, no action was taken.

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s time to wake up to the real nature of what is going on here.

Eventually, Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to help him restore order. 

That a United States Circuit Judge had to ask at all is a complete disgrace.

At this point, Associate Dean Steinbach came up to the front and took the podium. Judge Duncan asked to speak privately between them, but she said no, she would prefer to speak to the crowd, and after a brief exchange, Dean Steinbach did speak. She said she hoped that the FedSoc chapter knew that this event was causing real pain to people in the community at SLS. She told Judge Duncan that “she was pained to have to tell him” that his work and previous words had caused real harm to people.

Does anyone reading this remember the “Piss Christ”? It was a 1987 photograph that thousands or millions of Christians found painful if not repulsive, but was widely celebrated in academia and sophisticated culture as avant garde and provocative. Only small-minded wahoos would think it “caused real harm to people.”

Hey, look, that was then.

“And I am also pained,” she continued, “to have to say that you are welcome here in this school to speak.” She told Judge Duncan that he had not stuck with his prepared remarks and was partially to blame for the disruption for engaging with the protesters. She told Judge Duncan and FedSoc that she respected FedSoc’s right to host this event, but felt that “the juice wasn't worth the squeeze” when it came to “this kind of event.” She told the protestors that they were free to either stay or to go, and she hoped they would give Duncan the space to speak—but as one FedSoc member told me, the tone and tenor of her remarks suggested she really wanted him to self-censor and self-deport, i.e., end his talk and leave.

“This invitation was a set-up,” Judge Duncan interjected at one point while Dean Steinbach criticized him. And I can see what would give him that impression: as you can see from this nine-minute video posted by Ed Whelan, when Dean Steinbach spoke, she did so from prepared remarks—in which, as noted by Whelan, she explicitly questioned the wisdom of Stanford’s free-speech policies and said they might need to be reconsidered. (At least at Yale Law School, Dean Heather Gerken had the decency to criticize disruptive protesters, instead of validating them.)

How’s that? Dean Steinbach spoke from prepared remarks? She knew this was coming? How? To one extent or another, was she in on it? Will anyone ever ask?

As you can see from the video, about half of the protestors eventually left at the direction of a student protest leader, with one of them charmingly calling the judge “scum” as she walked out. Yet the heckling continued, and still the administrators did nothing to intervene. Eventually, the student-relations representative tried to intervene once it had become clear that the event was out of control—but Judge Duncan then criticized him, telling him that he should have acted sooner. 

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Woke’s version of academic freedom. Or any freedom, while we’re at it.

Finally, the event concluded when the heckling was so disruptive and Judge Duncan was so flustered that it could not continue. One source told me the event ended about 40 minutes before the scheduled end time (although a second source told me they thought it ran for a bit longer). So defenders of the SLS protest might argue that technically the judge wasn’t “shouted down,” since he did get to speak for some amount of time. But it was difficult for many to hear him, and it’s a pretty sad commentary on the state of free speech in American law schools if the ability to get out a few words is the standard for acceptable events.

Just today, Stanford Law Dean Jenny Martinez issued the following statement:

Dear SLS -

Most of you have likely heard about an event on March 9, 2023 at the Stanford Law School hosted by the chapter of the Federalist Society and featuring Judge Kyle Duncan of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.  A video of a small portion of the event has been circulating online.

The law school advised students who announced that they planned to protest the event of university standards and policies on freedom of speech, including the specific university policy prohibiting disruption of a public event. It is a violation of the disruption policy to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event.” Heckling and other forms of interruption that prevent a speaker from making or completing a presentation are inconsistent with the policy. Consistent with our practice, protesting students are provided alternative spaces to voice their opinions freely. While students in the room may do things such as quietly hold signs or ask pointed questions during question and answer periods, they may not do so in a way that disrupts the event or prevents the speaker from delivering their remarks. 

In the past few years, we have had a number of events with controversial speakers proceed without incident.  Other than someone who hoped to create a meltdown for the cameras to capture, no one can be happy about what happened yesterday. In this instance, tempers flared along multiple dimensions. In such situations, an optimal outcome involves de-escalation that allows the speaker to proceed and for counter-speech to occur in an alternative location or in ways that are non-disruptive. However well-intentioned, attempts at managing the room in this instance went awry.  The way this event unfolded was not aligned with our institutional commitment to freedom of speech.

The school is reviewing what transpired and will work to ensure protocols are in place so that disruptions of this nature do not occur again, and is committed to the conduct of events on terms that are consistent with the disruption policy and the principles of free speech and critical inquiry they support. Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society, and we can and must do better to ensure that it continues even in polarized times. 

Sincerely,

Jenny Martinez

The statement seems fair enough as far as it goes — but that’s not nearly far enough, because it neither recognizes nor confronts what’s actually going on here, that being Brownshirtism. The disrupters did not behave like students in any recognizable sense. They behaved like fascist thugs, and that’s how they should be treated. If they aren’t, they’ll be back, only more menacing next time.

Stanford Law School should announce that it will do the following:

— Review all available evidence and hold the disrupting students accountable (after giving them the due process they would deny others). Penalties will range up to expulsion, although that would be reserved only for the most extreme cases.

— Require Associate Dean Steinbach unequivocally to apologize to Judge Duncan.

— Require her to apologize to the Federalist Society chapter.

— Require her to apologize to those who attended in good faith.

— Require her to write and publish a paper discussing the imperative need for free expression and robust debate in society generally, and especially on college campuses.

— Invite Judge Duncan to re-appear as a guest of the Law School itself, to speak on the legal subject of his choice.

— Provide ample security at that event, and forthwith eject any disrupter by such means as may prove necessary.

We are either going to make these hoodlums pay a price or we’re not. And for that choice, we not they will be responsible.