Legal scholar Ilya Shapiro was shouted down at UC Hastings Law this week, and a constitutional-law professor there is fine with that.
On Tuesday, the libertarian-conservative constitutional-law scholar Ilya Shapiro was shouted down by student activists at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law. Shapiro, who has been embroiled in a far-reaching controversy over a series of tweets criticizing the use of racial preferences in Supreme Court nominations, was scheduled to deliver a lecture on campus about the recent Supreme Court vacancy. The event, which was organized by the school chapter of the Federalist Society months in advance, was set to feature a debate between Shapiro and Professor Rory Little, a progressive member of the UC Hastings Law faculty.
That debate never occurred. Instead, students affiliated with the UC Hastings Black Law Students Association (BLSA) hurled profanities (“You’re a f***ing coward!”) and insults (“Are you sad that you’re balding? I would be”) at Shapiro for upwards of 45 minutes. Whenever Shapiro attempted to speak, he was quickly drowned out by shouts and table-pounding from the assembled group of activists. When the academic dean made an effort to calm the room, reminding students of the school code of conduct’s express commitment to free speech and academic freedom, it was met with laughter and boos. “It’s not a legitimate point of view!” a student yelled. “We can’t have a bigot on campus,” another said. One law student approached the dean directly. “Y’all tried me way too many times,” she screamed. “Remove him off the f***ing campus, because that’s what we want.” The crowd cheered.
Professor Little sat at a table in the front of the room throughout the debacle, watching silently as student activists chanted, pounded the table, insulted Shapiro, ridiculed the president of the Federalist Society and the academic dean, drew “black lawyers matter” on the whiteboard, and hijacked the Zoom livestream of the event.
But when Shapiro and the academic dean left the room for a period, Little appeared to endorse the effort to deplatform his interlocutor. In a livestream of the event posted on the BLSA’s Instagram, Shapiro and event organizers are shown leaving the venue to consult with one another about how to respond to the protesters. While they were absent, the livestream captured an interaction between Little and BLSA activists in which Little expresses his support for the students shouting down Shapiro. “Professor Little, you said you’re all for us?” one activist asks. “Can you look in the camera and say that?”
“I’m all for the protest here,” Little responds.
“Can you look in the camera and state why, and tell them that you’re for us?” the activist repeats.
Little turns to the camera and waves, removing his mask from his face to smile. “I’m all for it,” he repeats.
Little, who declined to comment for this piece, did not appear to reiterate his support for the student activists while Shapiro or school administrators were in the room. But his endorsement of the deplatforming effort would seem to be consistent with views that he has publicly expressed in the past. In 2018, Little penned an essay in Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly titled “Hating Hate Speech: Why Current First Amendment Doctrine Does Not Condemn a Careful Ban.” The essay argued for the constitutionality of “a ban on racialized hate speech,” arguing that “precedent does not condemn a narrow” prohibition on speech that Little describes as “a direct attack on the psyche of minority individuals and groups.” (“Individuals and communities are affected by the injurious and lasting psychological impacts of hate speech,” he explained. “Hate speech can cause its targets to turn to self-harm or suicide, as well as damage their confidence and self-esteem.”) Little went on to outline a model “draft hate speech statute”:
(a) It shall be unlawful to make any speech at a public gathering or on public media that asserts or is clearly premised on the racial or religious inferiority or hatred of a minority group and is intended to intimidate or injure any individual or members of the targeted group.
(b) An intent to intimidate is defined as an intent to create in the targeted individual or group a fear of bodily harm or violence. Intent to injure shall include intent to cause others imminently to injure the target(s), as well as intent to cause demonstrable nontrivial harm to a target’s physical or psychological wellbeing. The requisite intent shall include willful blindness to reasonably known harms caused by such speech.
Little, who has taught at UC Hastings since 1994, previously served as an appointed member of the American Bar Association’s national Committee on Professional Responsibility, and clerked for Supreme Court justices William Brennan and John Paul Stevens, among many other positions. Today, his classwork at UC Hastings includes “regularly teach[ing] Constitutional Law I and II,” according to his page on the law school’s website.
Those constitutional-law classes introduce future members of the legal profession to First Amendment theory and jurisprudence. Constitutional Law I, a requirement for all students at UC Hastings Law, “examines the structural provisions of the Constitution of the United States” and covers topics such as “judicial review and limits on judicial power, federalism and the powers of Congress, the dormant commerce clause, and the separation of powers,” according to the law school’s 2021–22 course catalog. “The course focuses particularly on the provisions of the original Constitution, while later courses in Constitutional Law examine the rights-granting provisions of the Constitution, including especially the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment,” the catalog says.
Constitutional Law II is one of those “later courses” that Little also teaches. It “covers the First, Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ protection for free speech, religion equal protection, due process and privacy rights,” according to the school catalog.
Little is not the only member of the UC Hastings faculty who has expressed sympathy for the BLSA activists — and skepticism of free-speech protections for Shapiro’s comments. Veena Dubal, who teaches employment law and a “critical race theory seminar” at UC Hastings, tweeted the UC Hastings BLSA’s condemnation of Shapiro and list of demands less than an hour after the Tuesday episode. The BLSA statement that Dubal shared denounced Shapiro’s “overt propagation of white supremacy and anti-Black racism” and demanded, among other things, “the creation of a committee of diverse student representatives to be made part of the on-campus speaker approval process.” It also demanded that the school require “faculty to undergo intensive CRT training and education before advising any student organization” and mandate “CRT as a graduation requirement for all students.” Dubal wrote that she was “sharing” the statement “upon” the “request” of the activists. As I wrote yesterday, quoting Dubal:
“For me, the central intellectual query here is not whether Shapiro can speak, but why he was invited,” she added. “Why is the voice of someone who has made overtly racist & misogynist statements being elevated? . . . I found [Georgetown Law Professor Paul Butler’s] OpEd in the Washington Post useful in drawing a sharp line between speech protected by the ideal of ‘academic freedom’ & speech that is racist & sexist.” . . .
Dubal told National Review via email that her comments were “not public support of [the BLSA’s] actions” and that “the Federalist Society students were within their right to invite Shapiro; my wish is that the focus of the debate prior to his arrival was on why he was invited.” She declined to address the specific question of whether Shapiro should be fired from Georgetown Law. “I believe that the process that the administration engages in to make their determination should consider the impact of his statements on the students he is hired to teach,” she wrote.
Dubal’s Twitter account was public when she shared the BLSA statement, but it was moved to private after National Review reached out to ask her for comment. She had not responded to a follow-up request for comment by the time of this post.