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Law Professors Tag

Back in November 2020, we covered the case of Valentina Azarova, a Germany-based “human rights scholar” who was denied the directorship of the University of Toronto School of Law International Human Rights Program (IHRP). Outraged, her supporters complained that a Jewish alumnus and donor—a sitting Tax Court judge ill-disposed to Azarova's work on "Israel's occupation of Palestine"—prevented her hire via behind-the-scenes pressure. Now, an independent investigation has disproven this claim, but Azarova's advocates are sticking to—and relentlessly spreading—their original, false narrative.

Everyone has been focused for the past two days on the story in The Atlantic, attributed to anonymous sources, about things Trump supposedly said about troops two years ago, something so far that every person who has gone on record has denied. While you were focused on that Crisis News Cycle, Trump took a step the implications of which could be devastating over time to the peddlers of racial conflict under the academic construct of Critical Race Theory.

Today was perhaps the biggest farce yet in the impeachment saga. Two of the law professors called by the Democrats (Pamela Karlin and Noah Feldman) were so over-the-top partisan and political, that they buried whatever legal points they were making. The third law professor called by Democrats, Michael Gerhardt, was not much better. There was little difference between their harangues and those of Adam Schiff and other Democrat politicians. They soiled themselves.

Elizabeth Warren posted on her campaign website a list of 56 cases on which she worked while employed as a law professor. In some of the cases she acted as legal counsel in a litigation, in others she gave legal advice outside of a court litigation, and in others she was retained as an expert. Soon after that information dump, the Washington Post ran a story about it, indicating WaPo had been looking into Warren's legal caseload, While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour:

Hundreds of law professors have signed a letter calling Brett Kavanaugh disqualified for the Supreme Court because of the temperament he displayed at the Senate hearing on September 27, 2018, with regard to alleged sexual misconduct. The letter, with original signatories as of October 1, 2018, has been circulating among law faculties. It has become the liberal law professor virtue signaling event of the year.

One of the things that struck me about this article excoriating Alan Dershowitz for his recent defense (not support, but defense) of Trump is that author Elie Mystal doesn't actually engage in any detail with the substance of Dershowitz's arguments. Mystal's attack on Dershowitz (and Trump, for that matter) is ad hominem. I assume we're just supposed to take what the author says at face value. Or perhaps he assumes that if we're reading him at all, we already agree with him.

Brian Leiter's Law School Reports website, run by U. Chicago law professor Brian Leiter, isn't a high traffic site, but it does have a following among people interested in the law professor profession. So it is not surprising that some Legal Insurrection readers also read Leiter's website. Several of those readers contacted me today about a guest column by USC Professor of Law and Accounting Michael Simkovic about me and other conservative law professors. I don't know who Simkovic is and never heard of him before.

The National Lawyers Guild is a leftist group with chapters at numerous law schools. The City University of New York (CUNY) Law School Chapter of NLG led the protests against and disruption of the lecture by Prof. Josh Blackman, as we documented in “F*ck the law” – CUNY Law students attempt shout-down of conservative law prof.

Increasingly, campus "social justice" activism is resembling the tactics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, particularly the public shaming of those deemed ideologically incorrect, including professors. In The new Cultural Revolution on Campuses in late April 2017, I reviewed recent examples, including Yale, Cornell, Middlebury and Claremont McKenna: