Like it or not, Yale Law School is, at least for the moment, one of the premier duopoly of law schools in America. It has produced Supreme Court justices and legal academics galore. Its graduates, like Senator Josh Hawley, sit in the halls of power with Harvard Law School’s grads, like Senator Ted Cruz. Going to YLS is a big deal. Graduating from YLS puts you on a path of power and privilege. And the current crop of students believes that they should use that power and privilege for what they believe to be good.
And that’s a problem. David Lat sums up the latest controversy, primarily reported by Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon.
More than 100 students at Yale Law School attempted to shout down a bipartisan panel on civil liberties, intimidating attendees and causing so much chaos that police were eventually called to escort panelists out of the building.
The March 10 panel, which was hosted by the Yale Federalist Society, featured Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association (AHA) and Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a conservative nonprofit that promotes religious liberty. Both groups had taken the same side in a 2021 Supreme Court case involving legal remedies for First Amendment violations. The purpose of the panel, a member of the Federalist Society said, was to illustrate that a liberal atheist and a conservative Christian could find common ground on free speech issues.
The key feature here is not that students took issue with an invited speaker so much as the belief that the speaker’s organization, ADF, was evil and should not be heard. So they shouted the program down to silence it. At one point, Yale prawf Kate Stith, who was to moderate the presentation, rose to tell the students to “grow up.”
The students did not appreciate Stith’s admonition, and let their feelings be known.
Numerous issues arose from what happened at YLS, from a debate over whether silencing a speaker is an equivalent exercise of free speech, such that it would be hypocritical to support the free speech rights of the invited speakers and not the rights of the students to silence the speakers,* to whether this was as chaotic and bad as it first appeared, or just a brief if loud expression of disapproval that didn’t prevent the program from proceeding.
On the students’ part, they subsequently sent an open letter signed by a majority of the YLS student body grieving the administration having called in Yale Police to assure order.
We write as a coalition of queer students and allies deeply concerned with the presence of armed police at a peaceful protest of law students on campus this past Thursday.
As an aside, there are rumors that some students were “bullied” into signing the letter, and threatened that their failure to do so would signal that they were racists, etc. From the outside, a new issue arose when D.C. Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman sent an internal email to all Article III judges.
The latest events at Yale Law School, in which students attempted to shout down speakers participating in a panel discussion on free speech, prompt me to suggest that students who are identified as those willing to disrupt any such panel discussion should be noted. All federal judges—and all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech—should carefully consider whether any student so identified should be disqualified from potential clerkships.
For the nonlawyers, federal judicial clerkships are huge on baby lawyers’ resumes, the sort of thing that starts future Supreme Court judges down the very special path traveled only by the most select. It’s a big deal.
Judge Silberman’s slightly equivocal call to “disqualify” students who disrupted the panel, presumably based on who signed the open letter, is the wrong response, adding more “cancel” to a culture spiraling downward toward its nadir. It’s no less wrong to “disqualify” a student from their potentially bright future of prominence because of their beliefs than to silence a speaker.
At the same time, the fact that a significant number of students at one of the two most prominent law schools believe that speakers with whom they disagree must be silenced, and that their beliefs trump all others to the exclusion of suffering any speech, any idea, any speaker, any organization, that does not pass their ideological litmus test cannot be tolerated, raises a critical question about whether YLS (and, indeed, law students at all the elite schools) should be our future senators and Supreme Court justices.
In the past, norms of behavior might have prevented this issue from arising, not because elite law students didn’t hold extremely progressive beliefs, but because they constrained their most childish impulse to throw a tantrum to silence others whose views differed. They might be curious enough, on the one hand, to listen and consider what a speaker had to say before vehemently disagreeing with them. They might be polite enough to suffer an argument with which they disagreed rather than taken the course of action of preemptively silencing it so it could not be said or heard by those who were curious.
Professor Stith’s simple admonition, “grow up,” was the right answer. The students are allowed to disagree, and allowed to express their disagreement. They can protest, if that’s what they think will serve some useful purpose. But what they did instead was behave like spoiled children, brats, who believe they are entitled to do act however they want, subject to no norms of civility or propriety. Perhaps if they grow up, recognize the disgraceful childishness of their ideas and ways, they will one day be worthy of high office and great power.
But their reaction to Stith wasn’t to realize they were behaving like entitled children, but the response one expects of spoiled brats. If that’s what a YLS education represents now, they have no future pulling the levers of society in the future. Not that they should be “disqualified,” but that there is no place for such infantile behavior in a judge’s chambers, a courtroom or the halls of Congress.
*Volokh has taken the position that uninvited speech in a non-public forum that serves only to silence the invited speaker is not an exercise of free speech. Much as I agree with the outcome, it’s conclusory, and it’s unclear what principled basis supports Eugene’s conclusion.
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You’re probably right that these students shouldn’t be disqualified from potential career enhancing positions as clerks for federal judges. But at the same time, they also need to realize that there are consequences for their actions.
People in the real world are judged all the time on how they perform at work and how they interact with others in the work force. Performance reviews are made and subtle notes are jotted down. All this to say that just because someone is an asshole or jerk when they are younger, doesn’t necessarily mean they will be the same as they “grow up.”
The real world can be a stone cold bitch and reality has a hell of a left hook. These students need to be prepared for that and a lot of them aren’t.
I feel sorry for the future clients of these students because as you pointed out, these students won’t be prepared to handle a dissenting viewpoint. And shouting down the opposing counsel may work on TV but not in a court room.
Their tendency to be less than candid, however, is sure to win judges over.
I’m regularly told by people I know in public defense supervisory positions that their staff fails to appreciate the difference between how they argue on social media and what’s persuasive in a courtroom. They believe that can distinguish between the two, but experience in the trenches suggest that they’re wrong.
You can send lumpen idiots to fancy schools, but they are what they are. It is not possible to polish a turd.
Smart and wise are not the same thing.
Let them run amok. They will find the cliff edge eventually. On the way over those few who will become wise will be blessed with the clear thought, “Well, this was a stupid idea.”
Weird thing is that this has been the expectation for the past decade, and yet no one has fallen.
Patience, my friend. A decade is a blip in time. I’ve run full speed off a couple of cliffs myself without seeing them coming and have first-hand knowledge of their instructive powers.
You have it backward. They weren’t born stupid. They worked very hard for 16 years to achieve that status, and their teachers diligently trained them. Our “education” system is not a failure; it is a resounding success. Its job is to turn children into mindless tools, and it does that very efficiently.
Buh ,bu, but…
[asking permission to make a cultural contribution]
If Silberman is instead suggesting, as I’d read him, that the students who actually disrupted the panel, which appear to be a considerably smaller group than those who signed the open letter, be disqualified for clerkships, the suggestion seems much less troublesome. Those who (willingly) signed the open letter are fools, but have not thereby shown themselves to be willing to work to silence any contrary views. But those who took part in the disruption have.
Judge Silberman’s slightly equivocal call to “disqualify” students who disrupted the panel, presumably based on who signed the open letter, is the wrong response, adding more “cancel” to a culture spiraling downward toward its nadir.
While I understand your position here, how is this any different than an HR department googling someone as part of the hiring process and making a decision not to hire based on their social media presence, aside that these children willingly forced this into view rather than having search for it. Perhaps this is the beginning of the negative outcomes for this type of behaviour that starts to teach them to behave better.
Nuance matters, LY. Calling for disqualification rather than consideration makes a big difference. No one is suggesting that any judge should ignore what happened when deciding whether to give a YLS grad a clerkship, and many judges are very concerned about it and will consider it when making decisions. But that’s not the same thing as disqualification.
May I notice that history repeats itself. In the late ’60s Yale Law School suffered through what a dean referred to as “The Dark Ages.” Students demanded a bigger say in running the place, demonstrated, went on strike, petitioned and so forth. Times changed, and things returned to normal. For better or for worse.
I have to think history will once again repeat itself. I’m happy that at least one leader had the sense to say, “grow up.” That doesn’t seem to happen everywhere.
I’m not convinced that times are the same as the 60s, but I hope you’re right.