Law Prof Calls Out Stanford Students for ‘Infantile Protests’
“Hypersensitivity to feelings, and the desire to vent them in the crudest possible way, enfeebles law students.”
Andrew Koppelman is not impressed with the behavior of the students at Stanford Law School.
He writes at the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Stanford Law Students’ Infantile Protests
The students who disrupt right-wing speakers — the protest against Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who tried to speak at Stanford Law School, is a prominent recent case — have been appropriately criticized for their obliviousness to the value of free speech. I want to flag another issue: their piffling political ambitions. Today’s left aims to protect minorities from offense. It ought to aim to change the world.
The two aspirations are in conflict. Hypersensitivity to feelings, and the desire to vent them in the crudest possible way, enfeebles law students. It turns them into lousy advocates, useless to the social movements they hope to serve.
Before President Donald Trump appointed him to the Fifth Circuit, Duncan specialized in anti-LGBTQ litigation. As a judge, he nastily mocked a transgender litigant. Stanford’s Federalist Society invited him for a discussion, but he was unable to complete his remarks in the face of constant booing from audience members. The law school’s dean has since apologized for the school’s failure to enforce its own rules against shouting down speakers.
The Stanford chapter of the National Lawyers Guild defended the disruption, declaring that it “represented Stanford Law School at its best: as a place of care for vulnerable people, and a place to challenge oppression and bigotry in all their forms, including on the federal bench.” Stanford’s American Constitution Society said that the “vast majority of students’ shouting was to defend valued members of the SLS community against verbal abuse from a powerful man.” They seem to think that the way to do this is to stop Duncan from speaking. (In these pages, Jennifer Ruth has similarly argued that because many conservatives are attacking higher education, students who do the same are merely showing that they “grasp the moment.”)
It is a quack remedy. It confuses trivial, symbolic victories for real ones.
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Comments
I disagree with Andrew Koppelman on almost everything (he’s a hard leftist, but like fellow leftist Sandy Levinson he’s intellectually honest to a fault), but he nails the issue here. (Read the whole thing.)
Behavior like this is the opposite of what you need in order to become effective advocates, which is what you are supposed to be going to law school to learn.
I read Judge Duncan’s opinion in United States v. Norman Varner. He did not “nastily mock a transgender litigant.” He did point out why there were no grounds to amend the district court’s judgment and went on to explain the dangers of getting the courts involved in the pronoun wars.
Useful datapoint:
*Stanford’s American Constitution Society said that the “vast majority of students’ shouting was to defend valued members of the SLS community against verbal abuse from a powerful man.”*
“American Constitution Society” sounds great and legitimate doesn’t it? Apparently it’s not. Don’t hire students who participated in it, at Stanford at least, maybe elsewhere.
So lawyers are at their best when they care for vulnerable people?
Do the lawyers know that?
The old saying was that when it helps, argue the law.
When the law is against you, argue the facts.
If both the law and the facts are against you, pound the table.
I honestly do not understand who the demonstrators were trying to help. It seems as a performative effort to harm Stanford Law School’s reputation as quickly as possible.
I also read the decision and can’t find the nasti[ness] referred to. I’ll write and ask him to identify it for me.