1. David Lat yesterday evening posted a full audio recording of Judge Kyle Duncan’s event at Stanford a week ago. Anyone who listens to the first 11:40 of the audio — right up, that is, until DEI dean Tirien Steinbach takes the microphone to deliver prepared remarks castigating Duncan — will recognize, as law professor William A. Jacobson puts it, that “various legal trolls on the left” have been ridiculously wrong in their efforts to minimize the magnitude of the disruption.
In his commentary on the audio, Lat points out some other large respects in which Duncan’s attackers have been wrong. First, Duncan was not dismissive in responding to a survivor of sexual assault. Rather, he “was trying to explain that courts address concrete cases and controversies, not issues in a vacuum or ‘speeches.’” Second, Duncan, in his comment on the Supreme Court’s Obergefell same-sex marriage ruling, was not “insulting the many LGBTQ+ students among the protestors.”
2. I’ve just broken the news that Stanford’s Federalist Society chapter paid Stanford $150 to make a full video of the event but that Stanford is refusing to turn over the video that it made. (My source is a Federalist Society leader personally involved in the matter.)
Even though Stanford’s president and law-school dean have, by their apology to Duncan, acknowledged that the protesters violated university policy by disrupting his event, Stanford is protecting the protesters by keeping the video secret. Meanwhile, Stanford hasn’t even apologized to the Federalist Society members who have been so abused by their classmates, and it has instead encouraged those students to seek counseling from DEI dean Steinbach.
What a madhouse.