The slacktivists at Columbia Law School have found a new way to exploit the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner to the very convenient benefit of race card hustlers everywhere—
they’re canceling finals.
That’s right. One of the finest law schools in the country is allowing the collective #outrage of its flock of immature, untested baby lawyers to completely derail the academic integrity of its exam system.
Via Power Line Blog:
The grand juries’ determinations to return non-indictments in the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases have shaken the faith of some in the integrity of the grand jury system and in the law more generally. For some law students, particularly, though not only, students of color, this chain of events is all the more profound as it threatens to undermine a sense that the law is a fundamental pillar of society designed to protect fairness, due process and equality….The law school has a policy and set of procedures for students who experience trauma during exam period. In accordance with these procedures and policy, students who feel that their performance on examinations will be sufficiently impaired due to the effects of these recent events may petition Dean Alice Rigas to have an examination rescheduled.
They’re also providing counseling and developing a speaker series to encourage open dialogue.
I’m not quite sure what the powers that be at Columbia are smoking, but whatever it is, it has made them forget what it actually takes to be a lawyer. I’m not sure how many of you reading this have ever gone through law school, but part of the educational process is reading things that some may find upsetting. My first internship involved criminal appeals in a Detroit court, and all I’ll say is that I saw things. Upsetting things. Things that make you angry. But I did the work and learned from it because that’s part of the job.
Any decent law professor will counsel his students to not absorb the trauma of the cases they handle. I firmly believe that engaging in a little bit of healthy empathy allows lawyers to form better arguments, but students who get so bogged down in how they feel about particular instances of injustice that they can’t complete an exam have no business becoming lawyers.
This is a dangerous precedent, not only because it breeds incompetence, but because it conditions these students to ignore facts and standards. I had a great professor in law school who beat us over the head with “WHAT IS THE STANDARD? WHAT IS THE STANDARD?” until we could recite legal standards in our sleep. Every law professor at Columbia knows that it’s impossible to know all the facts in the Garner case because the full grand jury report hasn’t been released. They also know that a grand jury in Missouri curated thousands of pages of evidence that led to no true bill against Darren Wilson.
And yet, here we are, encouraging our progeny to ignore everything they should be learning in favor of embracing everything the progressive outrage machine demands they should be feeling. They’re not encouraging productive action; they’re allowing their students to become run away with their emotions in a situation where the standard has produced a socially difficult result.
Riots don’t scare me; this, however, scares me.
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