Yale Law Students

[DE]

Interested in hearing our lawyers thoughts on the Yale law students derailing a free speech event?

Their thoughts on Judge Laurence Silberman’s statements?

“Reclaimers” at Harvard in 2016. 

 

 

[Bobref]

🥱😵

[DE]

1 hour ago, Bobref said:

🥱😵

Wow. Good to know you are ok with free speech being silenced as long as it’s not “your” free speech. 
 

And these future “lawyers” (activists really), should never receive their law licenses. Hope they don’t. Choices have consequences. 

1 hour ago, Bobref said:

🥱😵

I’d ask ND and IU for a refund. 

[Bobref]

32 minutes ago, DE said:

I’d ask ND and IU for a refund. 

And if I were you, I’d stay in my lane.

[Muda69]

15 hours ago, DE said:

And these future “lawyers” (activists really), should never receive their law licenses. Hope they don’t. Choices have consequences. 

 

https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/federal-judge-suggests-not-hiring-yale-law-students-who-disrupted-free-speech-event/

Quote

When one of the most distinguished federal judges in the nation sends out an email to all his fellow judges suggesting that they might not want to hire a certain group of law students for prestigious clerkship provisions, the entire legal profession takes notice.

Because of the circumstances surrounding such an unprecedented email, all Americans should take notice of what happened at Yale Law School on March 10, where a group of nearly 120 law students disrupted a Federalist Society event at which Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) attorney Kristen Waggoner spoke.

The students, purportedly speaking on behalf of LGBT-identified students, didn’t attend the event to see what Waggoner, and the other speaker, Monica Miller of the American Humanist Association had to say about a 2021 Supreme Court decision in favor of free speech rights of students – Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski.

They were there to do what the Left seems to think free speech consists of these days – prevent the event from happening because they don’t like one of the speakers, which, in this case, was Waggoner. Or more precisely, they don’t like ADF because it has been designated as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). ADF, along with a number of mainstream Christian organizations, have made it onto SPLC’s list because of their public positions and advocacy that adheres to biblical sexual standards.

The SPLC has its own problems, in addition to its anti-Christian hostility, but apparently the concerned students at Yale Law overlook such things when there is outrage to be expressed at Christian values.

Approximately 120 Yale law students, according to The Washington Free Beacon, stood up as the speakers were introduced and “began to antagonize members of the Federalist Society.” And one law student – and remember that law students are typically at least 22 years old – told a member of the conservative group, “I will literally fight you, b**ch.”

Only after law professor Kate Stith, who was present to introduce the speakers and moderate the event, told the disruptive students to “grow up,” and moments later to either leave or be helped to leave, was any semblance of order restored. Campus security was present. The students went out in the hallway, where they “began to stomp, shout, clap, sing, and pound the walls.” They also chanted “protect trans kids” and “shame, shame,” disrupting other classes and faculty meetings throughout the school.

To make matters worse, on March 12 over 60% of the law school’s students signed a letter supporting the disrupters and complaining that Prof. Stith’s “dismissal of our peaceful actions as childish” and the presence of “armed officers” put Yale Law’s “queer student body at risk of harm.”

Have these students lost their senses?

If they really believe such things, then whoever or whatever taught them to think like this has done them a great disservice.

These law students, at the number one ranked law school in the country, will typically go on to become the nation’s premier judges, lawyers and public servants. And this is how they treat people and organizations they oppose?

Law school is supposed to be the place where budding lawyers learn to dispassionately absorb opposing viewpoints and then passionately make the case for their own views. Try doing what those young lawyers-to-be did in an actual court of law before a real judge, and they wouldn’t last two minutes before they were held in contempt of court, fined, or thrown into a jail cell until they reconsidered their conduct.

Which is what Senior Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit must have been thinking when he penned the following email to his fellow federal judges about the incident:

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.

That’s huge.

And critically important to the legal profession and society at large. Silberman is the adult in the room, having served in public life since the Nixon administration. And here he is telling these immature law students that if they won’t act like lawyers, they won’t be treated as such in the job market.

Clerkships are considered a steppingstone for young law school graduates who have aspirations of becoming judges themselves, and a clerkship with a high-profile judge like Silberman could lead to a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice, which would be a golden ticket to any future job.

David Lat is a gay-identified lawyer who has written on happenings in the legal world for years. You’d expect that he would be supportive of the disruptive students because of his support for LGBT issues, right?

Wrong. In his article, “Is Free Speech in American Law Schools a Lost Cause?” Lat explores the events at Yale (and an earlier situation at University California at Hastings), and makes this point:

I’m glad that YLS faculty and administrators, especially Professor Stith, were able to protect this event from getting completely canceled. But I do wish that Dean Heather Gerken had sent out a message right after the event along the lines of Dean Faigman’s missive at Hastings, making clear that the protesters’ behavior—attempting to disrupt the event from inside the classroom, then repairing to the hallway and continuing to make excessive noise to drown out the event—was unacceptable.”

And this:

As a gay man who is in a same-sex marriage and raising a son with my husband, I strongly disagree with ADF’s views on same-sex marriage and parenting. But I strongly defend the right of its leaders to speak and to participate in public events, and I think the treatment that Kristen Waggoner received at YLS was disrespectful and wrong.

As Waggoner herself told the Beacon, “Yale Law students are our future attorneys, judges, legislators, and corporate executives,” she said. “We must change course and restore a culture of free speech and civil discourse at Yale and other law schools, or the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.”

 

[Bobref]

4 minutes ago, Muda69 said:

https://dailycitizen.focusonthefamily.com/federal-judge-suggests-not-hiring-yale-law-students-who-disrupted-free-speech-event/

 

Not hiring someone is one thing. Saying they should never receive a law license, even if they are otherwise qualified, is quite another.

[DE]

16 hours ago, Bobref said:

And if I were you, I’d stay in my lane.

No thanks Bob, I am perfectly fine right here.

Was told a time or two ago, "one needs to have thicker skin."

 

[swordfish]

https://nypost.com/2022/03/22/senators-should-ask-ketanji-brown-jackson-whether-she-backs-the-yale-law-hecklers-or-free-speech/

Senators should ask Ketanji Brown Jackson whether she backs the Yale Law hecklers — or free speech

By 

Post Editorial Board

March 22, 2022 4:34pm 

Should Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson join the Supreme Court, she’ll be a role model for students seeking careers in the legal profession. So senators this week should ask her views of protesters who shut down a recent Yale Law School discussion on free speech.

The Federalist Society event paired Monica Miller of the progressive American Humanist Association and Kristen Waggoner of the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom.

Yet some 120 students refused to tolerate anything the ADF (which they deem an anti-LGBT “hate” group because of its religious-liberty work) might say, so they assaulted the event, raising a ruckus and threatening panelists in a bid to silence them.

The protesters stomped, shouted, clapped, sang and pounded the walls nearby, making so much noise it disrupted classes, The Washington Free Beacon reports. They also blocked the only exit and grabbed and jostled at least two FedSoc members. Police had to be called to escort panelists safely from the site.

Worse, more than 60% of the law school’s student body (the most privileged future lawyers in the land!) signed a letter backing the protesters.

“If you can’t talk to your opponents, you can’t be an effective advocate,” notes Miller, the fellow progressive the mob muzzled. If this behavior is allowed, warns Waggoner (and Yale Law’s done nothing about it), “the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.”

So: Will would-be Supreme Court Justice Jackson condemn the mob and announce that she won’t hire any of its members as clerks? If not, she doesn’t deserve a single senator’s blessing of her ascent.

“If you can’t talk to your opponents, you can’t be an effective advocate,” notes Miller, the fellow progressive the mob muzzled. If this behavior is allowed, warns Waggoner (and Yale Law’s done nothing about it), “the future of the legal profession in America is in dire straits.”

Agreed.....

 

[Muda69]

The Takeover of America's Legal System

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-takeover-of-americas-legal-system?s=r

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...

The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.

Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.

Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this: Since the United States was systemically racist—since racism was baked into the country’s political, legal, economic and cultural institutions—neutrality, the conviction that the system should not seek to benefit any one group, camouflaged and even compounded that racism. The only way to undo it was to abandon all pretense of neutrality and to be unneutral. It was to tip the scales in favor of those who never had a fair shake to start with.

But critical race theory, until quite recently, only had so much purchase in legal academia. The ideas of its founders—figures like Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—tended to have less influence on the law than on college students, who by 2015 seemed significantly less liberal (“small L”) than they used to be. There was the Yale Halloween costume kerfuffle. The University of Missouri president being forced out. Students at Evergreen State patrolling campus with baseball bats, eyes peeled for thought criminals.

At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was “just a few college kids”—a few spoiled snowflakes—who would “grow out of it” when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened. 

All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory. 

Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality” and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups,” according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them. 

....

Another cornerstone of the rule of law is an impartial judiciary. Some judges, however, have begun to see themselves not as impartial adjudicators, but as agents of social change—believing, like Slaughter, that they cannot be neutral in the midst of moral emergencies.

During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, for example, Massachusetts Superior Court judge Shannon Frison vowed on Facebook to “never be silent or complicit again, in any courtroom or any context.” “As the very keepers of justice,” she said, judges “not only stand with the protesters—we fall with them.” 

The Washington State Supreme Court put out a statement recognizing “the role we have played in devaluing black lives,” and encouraged judges to strike down “even the most venerable precedent” if it is “incorrect and harmful.”

Such statements are not mere virtue signaling. They reflect sincerely held beliefs with real-world consequences. 

...

Minneapolis is a microcosm of a larger trend. As progressives have set about repurposing the law, they seem to have lost sight of the people they insist they’re saving: the poor, the vulnerable, the indigent—including many racial minorities.

Consider the movement to abolish the right to eliminate members of a jury pool. 

The so-called peremptory strike allows attorneys, in a trial case, to toss out potential jurors they deem biased. Peremptories, as criminal-defense attorneys see it, offer their least sympathetic clients—those against whom all the cards have been stacked—a glimmer of hope. 

The problem, as progressives see it, is peremptory strikes have also been used to disproportionately exclude potential black jurors. Supreme Court Justice Steven Breyer was among the most prominent to call for an end to peremptories, arguing in a 2005 opinion that they magnify racial bias in the legal system. But it wasn’t until the last year or so that the cause gained momentum. 

In August, the Arizona Supreme Court announced that the state would no longer allow peremptory challenges at civil and criminal trials. This came after a pair of Arizona judges launched a petition arguing that peremptories perpetuate “discrimination.” The New Jersey Supreme Court is considering a similar move.

It hasn’t gone over well with defense attorneys.

....

A somewhat long read, but worth it.