On March 9, 2023, activist students at Stanford Law School engaged in perhaps the most egregious violation of norms for both academia and the legal profession yet. (If you have also been following recent doings at Yale Law, as we have, that is quite the claim indeed.) Federal appeals court judge Kyle Duncan, invited by the school’s conservative Federalist Society to give a speech and conduct a Q&A session on the Fifth Circuit’s recent jurisprudence, was instead shouted down by a ranting mob of left-wing activists who hurled sexual insults at him, refused to let him speak uninterrupted, and were then greeted by the school’s own administrator who, instead of attempting to restore order, laid into Judge Duncan herself with a prepared speech and praised the disruption.
As appalling as this was, it was not the end. Stanford Law dean Jennifer Martinez issued a mortified apology to Judge Duncan — not only as a guest speaker, but as a federal judge whose colleagues, it must be noted, pay attention to such incidents when deciding how to fill highly coveted clerkship slots — and the same protesters decided to double down instead of backing off: They demanded she rescind the apology, urged her to place the Federalist Society under strict censorship, and even ventured to propose the expulsion of certain conservative fellow students.
The insanity had hit a fever pitch. On March 22, the administration acted accordingly and admirably: Stanford, under Dean Martinez’s name, has issued a ten-page memorandum to all students carefully explaining the school’s policy on free speech, noting that it was partially compelled by California state law and that, where it wasn’t, it was compelled by Stanford’s commitment to free inquiry, minority rights, and the freedom of unpopular speakers to be heard and have their views evaluated without the heckler’s veto or social-pressure campaigns brought to bear. And, in a surprising turn of events, the memorandum mandates that the entire student body attend a training course so that they can be taught — as if for the first time in their young lives — the values of pluralism.
Dean Martinez’s memorandum is substantively superb on the merits. She does not cheapen Stanford’s position by merely offering a grudging, technical, or purely legalistic defense of the rights of the Federalist Society to invite unpopular speakers and have their ideas heard. Rather cleverly, she turns the “DEI mission” of inclusion around exactly where it should be aimed — namely, back upon its weaponizers — and states outright that conservatives at the law school are every bit as deserving of inclusion as anyone else.
Martinez notes that the core of any good lawyer’s training is the ability to reckon intelligently with difficult opposing arguments (those one considers to be devilish or insidious are usually felt to be so precisely because they are effective), and ends with a defense of free speech on campus, reminding the activist cadres that their claims (e.g., that mere discussion of complex LGBT issues in a legal context is tantamount to “denying one’s right to exist”) are antithetical to the entire spirit of the school and the adversarial nature of the law. She announces flatly that Stanford will never bow to students who are demanding that it take institutional positions on social issues and censor those who deviate.
That said, her case against disciplining any of the students involved is less impressive. It is true, as she notes, that it may be difficult to identity which students in the room were being disruptive as opposed to making statements protected by the First Amendment, but it’s hard to believe that it’s impossible to identify the ringleader in a room with dozens of witnesses and a number of administrators present.
Regardless, it is more than a little disturbing when the entire student body of one of America’s top law schools — one that produces elite litigators, clerks, scholars, judges, administrators, and thinkers alike — is summarily deemed so fundamentally unaware of the basic requirements of professional and social comportment that they need to be carted off to mandatory day-camp for proper reeducation in the norms of civilization, lest they spread unchecked out into the world and destroy Stanford Law’s reputation for sanity among actual practitioners.
So while we strongly approve of Stanford Law’s statement committing itself to the principles of free speech and intellectual inquiry in the teeth of the cynical political demands of its students, we see a warning in it as well: The fact that it had to come to this at all suggests something is deeply amiss about the values of an entire generation of young elites.