It’s all too common for intolerant intellectually-closed-minded and emotionally insecure students to shout down speakers. It’s practically an art form at this point.
Increasingly, it’s happening at law schools, such as when Yale law students went bezerk to stop a visiting conservative lawyer from Alliance Defending Freedom from participating in a debate.
I can’t recall a visiting Judge being shouted down at a law school.
But yesterday that happened at Stanford Law School, where law students shouted down and prevented Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan from completing his lecture at a scheduled event on the topic of “The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter.” And what’s worse, law school administrators were complicit and egged on the disruption. Associate Dean for DEI Tirien Steinbach took the stage and berated the Judge.
Judge Duncan event at Stanford from Ethics and Public Policy Center on Vimeo.
What a disgrace. But to be expected in the poisonous DEI bureaucratic culture that has emerged in higher ed.
More details on the disruption:
David Lat has much more detail showing the connivance of the Stanford Law administration, as well as an interview with the Judge, Yale Law Is No Longer #1—For Free-Speech Debacles:
When the Stanford FedSoc president (an openly gay man) opened the proceedings, he was jeered between sentences. Judge Duncan then took the stage—and from the beginning of his speech, the protestors booed and heckled continually. For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him, with exclamations like “You couldn’t get into Stanford!” “You’re not welcome here, we hate you!” “Why do you hate black people?!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc students, f**k them, they don’t belong here either!” and “We do not respect you and you have no right to speak here! This is our jurisdiction!”Throughout this heckling, Associate Dean Steinbach and the University’s student-relations representative—who were in attendance throughout the event, along with a few other administrators (five in total, per Ed Whelan)—did nothing….After around ten minutes of trying to give his remarks, Judge Duncan became angry, departed from his prepared remarks, and laced into the hecklers. He called the students “juvenile idiots” and said he couldn’t believe the “blatant disrespect” he was being shown after being invited to speak. He said that the “prisoners were now running the asylum,” which led to a loud round of boos. His pushback riled up the protesters even more.Eventually, Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to help him restore order. At this point, Associate Dean Steinbach came up to the front and took the podium. Judge Duncan asked to speak privately between them, but she said no, she would prefer to speak to the crowd, and after a brief exchange, Dean Steinbach did speak. She said she hoped that the FedSoc chapter knew that this event was causing real pain to people in the community at SLS. She told Judge Duncan that “she was pained to have to tell him” that his work and previous words had caused real harm to people.“And I am also pained,” she continued, “to have to say that you are welcome here in this school to speak.” She told Judge Duncan that he had not stuck with his prepared remarks and was partially to blame for the disruption for engaging with the protesters….“This invitation was a setup,” Judge Duncan interjected at one point while Dean Steinbach criticized him. And I can see what would give him that impression: as you can see from this nine-minute video posted by Ed Whelan, when Dean Steinbach spoke, she did so from prepared remarks—in which, as noted by Whelan, she explicitly questioned the wisdom of Stanford’s free-speech policies and said they might need to be reconsidered. (At least at Yale Law School, Dean Heather Gerken had the decency to criticize disruptive protesters, instead of validating them.)….At one point during the Q&A, Judge Duncan said, “You are all law students. You are supposed to have reasoned debate and hear the other side, not yell at those who disagree.” A protestor responded, “You don’t believe that we have a right to exist, so we don’t believe you have the right to our respect or to speak here!”Finally, the event concluded when the heckling was so disruptive and Judge Duncan was so flustered that it could not continue….After the event, Stanford FedSoc members asked Dean Steinbach for her thoughts. She asserted that nothing the protestors had done violated the Stanford disruption policy and that the event had been “exactly what the freedom of speech was meant to look like—messy.” She said that if Judge Duncan had wanted to give his remarks, he should have just kept reading them, and she claimed that he was disrespectful to the attendees….Judge Duncan told me that while he was warned about possible protest, what he encountered far exceeded his expectations, as well as anything he has ever encountered at any of the many law schools he has spoken at. He also shared with me that he had received assurances from the SLS administration—through Professor Michael McConnell, the prominent conservative legal scholar and former Tenth Circuit judge, who served as intermediary—that while there might be protesters, they would not be disruptive. So Judge Duncan was definitely (and understandably) caught off guard by what transpired yesterday….What did Judge Duncan have to say for himself in general? In a phone interview this afternoon, he made several points to me:
- “I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me because I had to endure a bunch of people jeering at me. I did think it was outrageous and unacceptable, but nobody should feel sorry for me. I’m still going to be a judge, and I’m still going to decide my cases.”
- “I do feel bad—and outraged—for the Stanford FedSoc students. They are awesome people who just want to invite interesting judges to come talk to them. They’re a small group, obviously way outnumbered. They are the ones who lack power and status at Stanford Law. It’s ridiculous that they can’t get treated with civility, and it’s grotesquely unfair.”
- “I get where my critics are coming from, and I understand why they don’t like me. They claim that I am marginalizing them and not recognizing their existence. But this is hypocritical of them, since that’s exactly what they are doing to their classmates in FedSoc.”
- “I get the protesters, they are socialized into thinking the right approach to a federal judge you don’t agree with is to call him a f**ker and make jokes about his sex life. Awesome. I don’t care what they think about my sex life. But it took a surreal turn when the associate dean of DEI got up to speak…. She opens up her portfolio and lo and behold, there is a printed speech. It was a setup—and the fact that the administration was in on it to a certain degree makes me mad.”
- “I later heard that the associate dean of DEI was claiming two things. First, she claimed that I didn’t have a prepared speech and was just there to stir up trouble. It was a long flight out to Stanford, I’m not a professional rabble-rouser like Milo Yiannopoulos, and I’m not trying to sell a book. I actually had a speech, it was on my iPad, and I was going to be talking about controversial cases handled by the Fifth Circuit that present difficult issues because the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on them is in flux.”
- “Second, she claimed that the fact that two U.S. marshals showed up at the event was a sign that I’m a rabble-rouser and disruption always happens when I speak. But I didn’t bring or invite these marshals; these marshals from the Northern District of California just showed up after getting a tip-off. I have never been protested like that at any other law school, I have known of other conservative judges who have spoken at Stanford without any problems, and I spoke there in 2019 without any problems. So I was lulled into a false sense of security.”
- “You don’t invite someone to your campus to scream and hurl invective at them. Did I speak sharply to some of the students? I did. Do I feel sorry about it? I don’t.”
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