Two Federal Judges Say They Will No Longer Hire Clerks From Stanford Law School
“students who practice intolerance don’t belong in the legal profession”
One of these judges has already said that he won’t hire clerks from Yale Law School. Now Stanford is on the list, too.
The Washington Free Beacon reports:
Federal Judges Say They Won’t Hire Clerks From Stanford Law School
James Ho and Elizabeth Branch, the circuit court judges who announced last year that they would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, are adding Stanford to the boycott.
“We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,” Ho, who sits on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, said Saturday evening in a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics, a transcript of which was reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. The clerkship moratorium, like the one on Yale, will exempt current law students.
Ho’s announcement is the latest and most dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down by hundreds of students—and berated by Stanford diversity dean Tirien Steinbach—when he spoke at the law school last month. The students called Duncan “scum,” asked why he couldn’t “find the clit,” and screamed, “We hope your daughters get raped.”
Though Steinbach is on leave, Stanford has ruled out disciplining the hecklers, who by Stanford’s own admission violated the school’s free speech policy.
“Rules aren’t rules without consequences,” Ho said. “And students who practice intolerance don’t belong in the legal profession.”
Calling the disruption an act of “intellectual terrorism,” Ho argued that Duncan’s treatment reflects “rampant” viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single center-right professor. It is no coincidence, Ho said, that the worst free speech incidents have occurred at the law schools with the least intellectual diversity. Though Ho did not say what it would take for him to lift the boycott, he implied that a more politically diverse faculty—and a less ideologically uniform administration—would go a long way.
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Comments
“We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,”
Whoa, this is a WWE level smackdown! It smacks the institution’s future financial viability way more than it smacks the students.
The Stanford law dean’s much discussed 10 page memo directed to her students fails to mention Section 403 of the California Penal Code. Section 403 makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 6 months in jail and a fine of up to $1,000, for a person to wilfully disturb or breakup a lawful meeting or assembly. The law students clearly committed this crime on the Stanford campus. Thus, what the students did goes goes beyond the mere violation of Standard free speech policies.
I’m still not convinced that law isn’t specific to governmental meetings, not all meetings everywhere.
Is it just me, or does anyone else get the sense, our nation’s current events on the whole are getting to look a lot like mid-1930s Nuremberg–all over again?
It’s past time to heed Santayana’s famous warning about how history’s hardest lessons distinctly repeat themselves. Our once-inspiring rule of law is presently moribund if not already expired.
It is a step in the right direction, but i am certain the rowdy students will use it as resume’ enhancement with liberal judges.
The guilty students should not be allowed to practice law as they clearly don’t believe in the Constitution or Bill of Rights.
We need to know who they are. The list doesn’t seem easily available when I searched for it, and it should be. They should be proud of what they did and get all the credit they deserve, by name, especially when they look for jobs. Maybe someone will want to hire them because of it!
I believe it is an indictment more of Stanford Law School (the institution) than the “students” (children) themselves. Accepting such immature (although old enough to have been taught better) “candidates” for admission to the practice of law not only shows a lack of judgment on the part of the institution, it does the children harm by validating their lack of mature judgment.
Looks as though the best solution may be to tear it all down (decredential the school) and rebuild from scratch.
But they’re not children. If they’re still acting like children at that age, they are defective adults.
Unless people with gravitas such as these judges start to speak out we are going to be lost. I realize the dangerous foundation (many, many in the huge bureaucracies in authority and with an extreme liberal bias and using it) have been building for years, but think of the damage done by a guy at the top in just 2+ years of taking charge with Executive Orders and skipping the legislative process. Our Congress has really let us down in turning over law making to EPA, the IRS and other Federal biggies and not doing a proper duty of oversight of the FBI, ignoring any egregious oversteps., etc. We need a plethora of judges an others of their ilk to step up to the plate.
It’s not dangerous, because those liberal bureaucracies will use it regardless. But there should be a countervailing movement, hopefully even a larger one (and that will be no reason to limit it, to play for the tie) to give better opportunities to students who are serious and want to grow within the system and improve it, not to those who are willing to destroy the society. This is serious enough that one wants to minimize risk by choosing campuses that are not left-wing.
The boycott on hiring law clerks from Stanford law school would be even more effective if it were also done by judges of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Fransisco.