I’m pleased to see that NRO’s home page features an essay by Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan that draws lessons from the recent disruption of his event at Stanford law school. The essay is drawn from a talk he gave last week at Notre Dame. Read the whole thing. Some excerpts:
What went on in that classroom on March 9 had nothing to do with our proud American tradition of free speech. It was a parody of it. I’m relieved that Dean Martínez’s letter forcefully recognizes this. As she writes: “Freedom of speech does not protect a right to shout down others so they cannot be heard.” It is not free speech to silence others because you hate them. It is not free speech to jeer and heckle a speaker who’s been invited to your school so that he can’t deliver a talk. It is not free speech to form a mob and hurl vile taunts and threats that aren’t worthy of being written on the wall of a public toilet. It’s not free speech to pretend to be “harmed” by words or ideas you disagree with, and then to use that feigned “harm” as a license to deny a speaker the most rudimentary forms of civility….
Do not think for a moment that the mob showed up to “respond” to my talk or engage in some high-minded back-and-forth about what I was invited to Stanford to talk about. That would have been fine. But the mob had no interest in my talk at all. They were there to heckle and jeer and shame. If you doubt that, just listen to what they said. At one point, the ringleader — a young woman clearly visible in the video — asked the crowd to “tone down the heckling slightly so we can get to the Q&A.” That’s right: Let’s have the optimal level of heckling so we can get to the good part where we hurl questions at the judge like, “How do you feel about all the people your opinions have killed?” …
[L]et’s talk about legal education. We shouldn’t forget that this incident did not occur in a campus bar at 12:45 a.m. after the USC game. It occurred in a law school — indeed, one of our nation’s elite law schools. Dean Martínez’s letter eloquently explained why this makes the incident doubly shameful….
Dean Martínez is correct when she writes, “I believe we cannot function as a law school from the premise that appears to have animated the disruption of Judge Duncan’s remarks.” And what was that premise? That “speakers, texts, or ideas believed by some to be harmful inflict a new impermissible harm justifying a heckler’s veto simply because they are present on this campus.” I’ve heard someone comment recently that to be a lawyer means, by definition, to have to occupy the same room with people you seriously disagree with — and yet to have to engage in reasoned, indeed persuasive, argument with them. If that is true — and it is — then the primitive impulse to shout someone down is not a trait we should want to encourage in law schools. Just the opposite. It is a trait we should strive to help students unlearn….
The basic premise of a free and self-governing society is that we, as citizens, can reason together. This occurs not only in government but in the multitude of mediating institutions that constitute civil society. To accomplish this requires certain civic virtues — self-control, humility, tolerance, patience, moderation, courage, to name a few. What would happen if the cast of mind modeled in that classroom at Stanford becomes the norm in legislatures, in courts, in universities, in boardrooms, in businesses, in churches? We must resist this at all costs, otherwise we will cease to have a rule of law.
Relatedly: Kudos to Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky for his forceful condemnation of the students who disrupted Judge Duncan’s event.