Yale Law School Group Invites Law Professor Troll To Do Some Trolling
And the school will dutifully comply.
Yale Law School has spent the last few years patting itself on the back for inviting hate group representatives to campus and folding with alacrity whenever grandstanding politicians play the school for chumps. It’s not so much that the school offers a ready platform for bigotry — that’s within its rights — but that the institution so enthusiastically squelches the rights of protesters exercising their speech rights within existing time, place, and manner restrictions.
Free speech, as a concept, exists to protect the speakers who don’t have a university-supplied stage. Recasting it as a top-down right for the privileged guest to speak AT an audience of silent receptacles perverts the freedom into an authoritarian obligation to silence marginalized viewpoints. Orwellian is an overused term, but “shut up and listen to your betters exercise their freedom to speak or ELSE there will be discipline” fits that bill.
Anyway, the next opportunity for the law school’s feckless leadership to curry favor with the MAGA movement seems right around the corner…
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Of course.
The University of Pennsylvania mildly sanctioned law professor Amy Wax after years of looking the other way as she wrote opinion columns about how white culture is superior, publicly claimed Penn Law’s Black students weren’t passing in the top half of the law school class, said the country would be better off with fewer Asians, and inviting white supremacists to speak to her class. All of which she basically admitted during the inquiry, though she fought it anyway suggesting that “academic freedom” protected her doing all of this without ever exposing it to a hint of scholarly rigor.
She cites Wikipedia if you want to understand how much “academic” goes into her brand of “academic freedom.”
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Is there much of anything she can say that enriches the discourse? No. But that’s not important.
Yale Law Republicans are bringing her to chat because, for right-wing students looking to get ahead, trolling is the coin of the realm. The “serious” professionals who will ultimately set these students on a path to success aren’t interested in a sheepish bookworm with conservative leanings, they want candidates willing to throw bombs in school. All that can be swept under the rug at a future confirmation hearing as the excesses of youth. But what the conservative legal movement cannot countenance is another David Souter who quietly excelled in school while expressing a vague preference for lower taxes. THAT MAN WAS UNRELIABLE! Someone willing to wear anti-Trans shirts on Trans Day of Visibility? That’s a true believer right there.
Plus, the older, more serious conservatives privately find all the baseless cruelty super funny.
And it sets up another situation where students can exert their dominance over the administration. Like Donald Trump putting up Yale Law grad J.D. Vance despite Vance’s never-Trump past, the joy is in the submission. The fun is in students getting the law school to bully other students who might show up to ask pointed questions or picket the building. Which the school has shown itself happy to do out of fear that they might not appropriately silence their students to the liking of a Fifth Circuit feeder judge out there.
When Yale Law infamously had an event with recognized hate group Alliance Defending Freedom, the rules allowed two warnings for in-room disruptions before penalty — to ensure the protest was meaningful and heard — and the protesters took their warnings before leaving the room to picket. That’s actually a pretty good policy! And it’s a policy that conservative judges and the right-wing media turned into a public grievance as “broken” for its lack of enforced servility.
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People routinely (and cynically) screw up the concept of the Heckler’s Veto. It doesn’t mean “speakers should be protected from heckling” but rather “authorities can’t use a hypothetical protest as an excuse to silence a speaker.” To that end, conservative groups have trapped schools in a sort of reverse Heckler’s Veto, platforming controversial speakers for the express purpose of making the school silence a protest.
Which will keep happening until schools embrace well-vetted standards allowing controversial speakers while simultaneously respecting the right to protest free of administration threats and intimidation. Ideally by affirmatively protecting the right to protest with restrictions that allow it to be heard without being disruptive.
But that might be a bridge to far for their clerkship numbers.
Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter or Bluesky if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.
