Law Schools

Pocket Watching Trump Judge Wants To Control Law School Donations

Love seeing "Originalism" used as a cudgel.

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Judge’s gavel and stand with US dollar bills on the wooden table.Who is supposed to have a say on the interpretive models students learn in law schools? Judges apparently! Right wingers used to attack lefties for boycotts and cancel culture, but those are core right-wing policing strategies these days, with Republican judges wearing their politics on their sleeves when it comes to bullying law schools into doing what they want. First it was boycotting the students from law schools deemed too liberal, now they’re trying to get school funding cut if professors don’t teach the way the judges prefer. Bloomberg Law has coverage:

Conservative appeals court Judge Amul Thapar called on donors to withhold support from law schools that don’t hire an ideologically diverse faculty and teach originalist theory.

Thapar, a Trump appointee to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit and Supreme Court short lister, criticized what he said is an absence in originalist teaching at top law schools during remarks Wednesday at the Heritage Foundation.

Thapar went on to lament that the failure to teach law students an Originalist approach to the text ultimately hurts them because judges may be more amenable to matters if they hear history based analysis. Nice theory, but we regularly see judges craft opinions getting the history wildly wrong. At least according to the actual historians. Here are just a few times that judges opted to ignore historical context to arrive at the policy outcomes they preferred:ignoring the history of the 14th Amendment to read it as colorblind, ignoring the history of gun regulation to get their desired policy outcome in Bruen, not to mention making ahistorical arguments about the role of special counsel if it helps Trump avoid trouble. Oh, and just for shiggles, because those are some heavy cases, no one even tried to invoke history to potentially correct the flawed textualism of simple words like “boneless.”

Promoting Originalism and “diversity of thought” are the bits of velvet on the glove. “Do what we say or we attack your bottom line.” Read his own words:

“Make no mistake: money talks. Only when the taxpayers and donors alike demand it will law schools start to change,” Thapar said. “When law schools do change, the hefty price paid for a law degree might actually be worth it, because lawyers will leave law school equipped to practice in today’s courts.”

If you really want to prepare law students for today’s courts, originalism is the least of their concerns. You need to teach them how to bankroll judges, romance them, have ex-parte chats with the prosecution, or find a way to get all of their colleagues to agree they aren’t mentally fit if they write too many dissenting opinions. In a word, you’ve gotta teach students how to politic. Because the judiciary stopped being focused on historical meaning a long time ago.

Judge Urges Law School Donation Halt Until Originalism Taught [Bloomberg Law]

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Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s.  He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at [email protected] and by tweet at @WritesForRent.

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