(Originally published in The Western Journal.)
When students who want to become lawyers show a complete disregard for the document that our legal system is based on, there should be consequences. Sadly, those consequences are usually suffered by the people they represent.
Now, though, the tide may be turning, as it appears that some judges have decided to stop allowing themselves to be a doormat for the left.
Two conservative federal judges have said they will no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law School after students there shouted down Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Duncan, whom former President Donald Trump appointed, had been invited to speak at the school. Not only did the students not allow him to speak, but Stanford’s associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, supported them.
“Your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of their rights,” Steinbach told Duncan. “For many people here, your work has caused harm.”
It’s disingenuous. It portrays Stanford Law in a bad light. And it shouldn’t be surprising that there are repercussions. The most obvious is that it is doubtful the school will get many speakers who will bring a diversity of thought and viewpoints.
More importantly, Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch announced that they won’t be hiring clerks from the woke university.
“We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,” Ho stated Saturday, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
This move is a way for the judges to let law students know that they don’t value the education they receive at Stanford, to the point where it disqualifies them from a clerkship.
Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez wrote to Duncan to apologize, saying, “Staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.”
One might think this would mollify the judges, except that the students proved the incident wasn’t an exception. Outraged by the apology, students defaced Martinez’s classroom with fliers that said “Counter-speech is free speech” and “We have free speech rights too.”
This is also not the first time Ho and Branch have announced they won’t hire clerks from certain schools.
They previously said Yale law students won’t be clerking for them because of the “cancellations and disruptions” conservative speakers have received at the school, according to Reuters.
Not only is it arrogant of these students, who aren’t even lawyers yet, to think they know more than an experienced judge, but they think they can express it in a way that would not be allowed in a courtroom.
This also shows that they certainly haven’t been taught well if they think shouting, smearing and intimidating are any way to win an argument.
These students better hope they never have to try a case in front of the judge they have been maligning.
