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 ProtestsThe 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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