The disruption of a debate at Yale Law School by students protesting the appearance of Kristen Waggoner of Alliance Defending Freedom continues to reverberate.
Yale Law School, The Yale Daily News, and various law students have downplayed the incident as a mere protest that didn’t meaningfully disrupt the event, contrary to the original reporting by Aaron Sibarium at the Free Beacon:
That video, it is claimed, distorts what happened. Mark Joseph Stern at Slate wrote that the disruption alleged in the Free Beacon was really an insubstantial protest:
But interviews with participants and witnesses at the demonstration, as well as multiple videos, reveal that this account distorts reality. The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began. Their exercise in free speech, however rowdy or distasteful, did not prevent the panelists from expressing their views. And their demonstration did not—contrary to the Free Beacon’s reporting—require administrators to summon the police….Reasonable people can disagree about the students’ decision to disrupt Stith at the outset, but it is clear that they did not prevent the event from moving forward. Some students did ask pointed questions of Waggoner during Q&A, but these remarks were not vulgar or violent. There was some back and forth between audience members and panelists during this portion, but in the form of debate, not crude heckling.Once outside in the hallway, students continued their protest, and noise undoubtedly bled into the room. But it’s debatable this noise made it “difficult to hear the panel,” as the Free Beacon reported. The conversation remained audible inside the room, albeit with the din of a demonstration just outside….
Aaron Sibarium responded:
Yet as we reported, Waggoner confirmed that the disruption not shown on the video was even worse and was consistent with Free Beacon reporting, Conservative Speaker Targeted at Yale Law School: “This wasn’t a protest. This was physical intimidation”
“These students were not only physically intimidating the other students and the speakers, they were pounding on the walls, blocking the exits, and disrupting the event throughout. … It shouldn’t take place on a law student campus in the law school classroom”
In response to my tweeting that story, a Yale Law student insisted I was spreading “fake news” and said I should rely on the official Yale Law School version, not Waggoner’s version:
Sorry, I’ll rely on the evidence, not the “official” version by a law school administration, particularly not one which has exhibited unseemly hostility to the Federalist Society and conservative students.
This is not a mere flip of the coin, in which reasonable people could reasonably reach different factual conclusions. John Sexton at HotAir has a pretty comprehensive overview of the evidence demonstrating the unreliability of attempts by Stern and others to downplay the disruption and why there is substantial evidence from neutral sources that the disruption was even worse than the Free Beacon originally reported.
Chief among those neutral sources was Yale Law alumnus David Lat, who tweeted audio portions and also revealed at his substack the results of his own investigation and sources (emphasis added):
[UPDATE (10:25 p.m.): Based on what I have heard from additional sources, as well as video and audio I have reviewed, I now believe that the disruption of the event was longer and more intense than described in the preceding paragraph. The noisy protest continued, at varying levels of intensity, throughout most if not all of the proceedings. This made it difficult for audience members to hear or focus upon the speakers at times, and it even disrupted classes and a faculty meeting taking place in other parts of the building. This new information doesn’t really change my analysis of the free-speech issues discussed below—except to perhaps reinforce my conclusions—but I note it for the record. It also explains why, a few paragraphs down, I have replaced “disruption” with “getting completely canceled.” The event was significantly disrupted, even if it wasn’t totally canceled à la Hastings and managed to limp to a conclusion.]
Lat then expanded on what he found:
[UPDATE (3/18/2022, 11:28 a.m.): For more details on just how disruptive the protest was—not just to the FedSoc event, but everything going on at YLS at the time—please see my Twitter thread.]
Here are some of those tweets (emphasis added):
2/ It wasn’t just the event that was disrupted.Classes were disrupted too, including Federal Courts (Judith Resnik) and Advanced Legal Writing (Rob Harrison).The latter was in Room 121—the room farthest away from Room 127, where the event took place.3/ Students in Federal Courts, across the hall from the event, reported that “the floor was shaking” and Professor Resnik asked on-call students to “yell” so they could be heard over the din.4/ A student in a classroom who was taking a test on an entirely different floor of the building could even hear the noise from the protest.In other words, it wasn’t just limited to the first floor.5/ The protesters did block the main hallway of YLS, at least for a time. See photo: [here]6/ A faculty meeting—the job talk of Professor Claudia Flores, a Latinx legal scholar whose work focuses on international human rights and inequality—was disrupted.After a few unsuccessful attempts to restart it, the meeting had to be moved to Zoom.7/ In my opinion, the YLS protesters should apologize to Professor Flores, whose job talk was collateral damage for their rowdy and rude protest.(I suspect that many of them would support having a Latinx professor of human rights law on the faculty.)8/ In the room for Professor Flores’s job talk was @YaleLawSch Dean Heather Gerken.Attendees kept looking at @GerkenHeather, expecting her to go out and say something to the protesters—but she did nothing.9/ Yes, I know, the dynamic duo of Dean of Students Ellen Cosgrove & DEI Director Yaseen Eldik were on the scene.But having Dean Gerken herself come out to confront the protesters would have been far more powerful—& might have succeeded in quieting them.
Lat also links to an account by a student:
Thanks for updating @DavidLat. The truth should be out there about how disruptive the protest was. I was at the event, I was there to learn, and I could hear virtually none of it the entire time. I hope @YaleLawSch enforces its own policies in the future in a meaningful way.
Lat reaches a conclusion about the state of law student attitudes similar to that I have expressed in posts on the Georgetown, UC-Hastings, and Yale Law incidents:
But here’s my big takeaway from the latest YLS controversy: the free-speech problem in our law schools isn’t just about administrators, and they can’t solve the problem by themselves. The problem goes much deeper and is rooted in the mindset of students—and by this I don’t mean any particular class of students, since they all eventually graduate, but law students more generally in the year 2022.
I would not downplay the role of faculty and administrators. They set the tone and are supposed to be the adults in the room. In almost every law school attack on speakers and law professors we have covered, faculty and administrators are as much a part of the problem as the students. It’s a culture of intolerance and a sick symbiotic relationship in which students, faculty, and administrators feed off each other.
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