Full Audio Confirms Stanford Law School Students Shouted Down Conservative Judge In Violation Of Policy

WILLIAM A. JACOBSON MAR 15, 2023 9:00 PM

There has been an attempt by various legal trolls on the left to claim that the shout-down of Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan by students at Stanford Law School was contrived by the Judge, was not as bad as the 9-minute video showed, and was a set-up from the get go.

Mark Joseph Stern at Slate (yes, Slate still exists) led the clown parade with a diatribe titled A Trump Judge’s Tantrum at Stanford Law Was Part of a Bigger Plan. Based on the url, it appears that it originally was intended to be titled that Judge Duncan was performing a “SCOTUS Audition” at Stanford (“trump-judge-kyle-duncan-stanford-law-scotus-audition”).

Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan went to Stanford Law School looking for a fight, and he got one…The judge has likely concluded that conducting himself like a truculent provocateur will increase his odds of advancing to the Supreme Court under a future Republican president….Before turning to the strategic element of Duncan’s very public tantrum, it’s worth clearing up some misinformation about the event. The initial narrative was heavily shaped by a video and accompanying Twitter thread posted by Ed Whelan, a conservative commentator… At the start of Whelan’s video, it sounds as if progressive protesters “shouted down” Duncan (in Whelan’s words), preventing him from delivering prepared remarks.As multiple firsthand accounts and videos demonstrate, that is not what happened. In reality, at the start of those remarks, the protesters peppered the judge with questions and criticisms but did not drown out his speech.

Jay Willis, who runs a website supported by the leftist judicial activist group We Demand Justice, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, Trump Judge Kyle Duncan got exactly what he wanted out of Stanford: Fame:

Much of the fallout has centered on who, exactly, is the bad guy here: the law students who were rude to a federal judge or the federal judge who gave at least as good as he got. Stanford, forever mindful of its desire to remain in the good graces of powerful people, issued a formal apology that did not satisfy the army of politicians and pundits (and Duncan) who demanded that the school discipline the protesters and/or fire Steinbach. The fact that the target of their outrage is a woman of color is, I am sure, a coincidence.No matter who you think behaved worse here, the answer doesn’t matter for Duncan, because he got what he wanted: fame. Ever since Brett Kavanaugh’s shameless partisan histrionics got him confirmed to the Supreme Court in 2018, maintenance of a dignified temperament has hardly been a prerequisite for Republican judicial candidates….By making his play for the attention that follows cancel-culture victimhood, Duncan showed them the way forward.In a conservative legal movement fueled by an unending supply of grievances, strategic self-martyrdom is about to become a lucrative business.

None of this conspiracy stuff comports with the 9-minute video, but the video starts at the point that Judge Duncan says he had been heckled relentlessly and asked for an administrator. Then appeared the now-famous Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach, who admonished the Judge for showing up.

(full video here)

We no longer have to guess what happened before the video started. David Lat obtained a full 42-minute audio of the appearance, including the time prior to when the video started. The audio confirms that the was an ugly shout-down of Judge Duncan.

Listen to the whole thing, but particularly the beginning.

Here are some of Lat’s observations annotated to the audio in the minutes leading up to Steinbach’s appearance (which is where the video starts):

• 0:00: The recording begins near the end of Stanford Federalist Society president Tim Rosenberger’s introduction, so it’s missing some heckling of Rosenberger (but you can catch a bit when he refers to Judge Duncan being appointed by President Trump).
• 0:35: Judge Duncan takes the podium, as students make gagging noises, and attempts to deliver his prepared remarks. And it’s clear he does have prepared remarks, focused on high-profile rulings of the Fifth Circuit in specific areas of law where Supreme Court jurisprudence is unsettled. He’s heckled intermittently—e.g., “Boring!” or “We took Con Law!”—but he’s able to speak to a certain degree. It’s not as much of a shutdown as Ilya Shapiro at Hastings. But at least in my opinion—and now that we have full audio, we can have an informed debate—the protestors did violate Stanford University’s Policy on Campus Disruptions, which prohibits “[p]revent[ing] or disrupt[ing] the effective carrying out of a University function or approved activity, such as… public events.” The policy doesn’t prohibit “preventing the carrying out” of a public event; it prohibits “preventing or disrupting the effective carrying out” of a public event, and the words “disrupting” and “effective” should be given some meaning.
• 7:10: “The depth of contempt that you are showing me….” This is where Judge Duncan first diverges from his prepared remarks to criticize the protesters. From this point forward, it gets more difficult to hear because the frequency and volume of the heckling increase.
• 8:43: “It is appalling. And obviously in this school, the inmates have gotten control of the asylum.” This line by Judge Duncan, which is audible, is immediately drowned out by the audience response.
• 9:30: Students shout “This is our jurisdiction!” and “This is a valid form of communication!” (For why shouting down a speaker at a duly authorized event in an academic environment is not a legitimate form of counter-speech, see Ken White’s excellent Popehat post, “Hating Everyone Everywhere All At Once At Stanford,” or this great Q&A with Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff for FIRE.)
• 9:43: Judge Duncan is still trying to deliver his prepared remarks, discussing divergent rulings of the Fifth Circuit and Sixth Circuit on the OSHA vaccine mandate.
• 10:10: After a student yells out, “You don’t respect us!”, Judge Duncan talks about the need to treat people the way you want to be treated yourself. A student asks, “How is it respectful to misgender someone in open court? I would like to know!”
• 11:40: Dean Tirien Steinbach identifies herself as an associate dean and enters the discussion: “You just asked for an administrator, and I’m here.”

So the event was a shout down. It wasn’t instigated by Judge Duncan, it was initiated and sustained by Stanford Law School students.

Lat observes that what happened seems a clear violation of Stanford policy.

The culture is rotten at Stanford Law School and among the leftist legal trolls trying to blame the victim, Judge Duncan.

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