Isaac Schorr takes issue with Fifth Circuit Judge James Ho’s decision to stop hiring law clerks from Yale Law School. He agrees with the premise that Yale is “an illiberal institution with a prejudice against conservatives on its campus” but maintains that Ho’s cure is the wrong kind of medicine:
The idea is that if talented young prospective law students know they will be blackballed if Yale appears on their résumés, they will not apply to or attend it. But that seems pretty far downstream from the here and now, and that’s only if Judge Ho’s newly recommended practice takes hold throughout the judiciary.
But preventing prospective students from applying actually isn’t the first intent here — the fundamental point of Ho’s move, as he explained in his speech, was to inflict a penalty on Yale Law School’s prestige and power by reducing its number of federal clerkships. In doing so, the hope is that the pressure on Yale administrators will eventually be enough to change their incentive structure when it comes to placating and/or fomenting campus mobs. Schorr is doubtful that the move, in and of itself, will be effective enough in that endeavor — “the only consequence we know Judge Ho’s declaration will have is that Yale graduates’ applications will be thrown out, and that’s a shame,” he writes. “Maybe only a few, or just one, or no Yale graduates will suffer as a result.” But he also argues that it would be bad if it were effective — “if Ho gets his wish, it’ll be a lot more.”
Regardless of how effective Ho alone can be in applying pressure to Yale, he’s not making this decision in a vacuum — his speech explicitly called for other judges to join him. The premise, again, is that applying collective pressure to Yale Law could actually make the administrators realize that there are consequences for going after conservatives. Schorr agrees that “conservatives should and must seek to change the culture at Yale and other institutions of higher learning,” but maintains that “at first glance, Ho’s means appear to send us down a long road toward a dubious solution that will punish innocent people in the interim.”
If you’re criticizing another man’s proposed solution to an issue that you both believe is a problem, it seems necessary to offer a viable alternative. I’d be curious to hear Schorr’s.