There are already consequences over the recent and disturbing Yale shout down incident. Good. It’s about time.
Excess of Democracy reports:
Federal judges have already begun to drift away from hiring Yale Law clerksOn the heels of the latest controversy at Yale Law School, which David Lat ably describes over at Original Jurisdiction, a federal judge penned an email to fellow 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.”The truth is, Yale Law has already seen falling clerkship placement numbers in recent years. Incidents like this may harden some judges’ opposition. (There are caveats, of course, about what factors affect a judges hiring practices, the political salience of the issues here, and so on.)I closely track federal judicial clerkship placement, and I have in recent years included a three-year average of clerkship placement in a report I release every two years. The latest version of that report is here. But we can look at some trends among a handful of schools. I select eight of the (historically) highest-performing: Yale, Stanford, Chicago, Harvard, Duke, Virginia, Michigan, and UC-Irvine. I’ll look at the last eight years’ placement. (Any choice of schools and window of time is a bit arbitrary, and I could go back for more data or more schools if I wanted. I didn’t look at 2012 or earlier data, so I don’t know what I’m missing with this cutoff.)
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