Stanford Law School Sends Entire Class to Detention

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, March 22, 2023

 

Those who haven’t kept up to speed on the increasingly weird scenes inside the gold mine of America’s elite law schools may have missed the latest outrage from the denizens of Stanford Law School, where Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan had his Federalist Society address shouted down by a howling mob of LGBTQ-activist students before the school’s own DEI administrator interrupted proceedings, not to silence the protesters, but to deliver her own prepared address attacking Duncan and praising the disruption.

 

National Review’s Ed Whelan has covered this disgrace like a hawk (at times breaking news on the scandal), but what needs to be emphasized is that after the incident, the Stanford Law protesters did not meekly desist in shame, as one might have expected them to after having publicly disgraced themselves. Instead, they demanded (1) that Dean Jennifer Martinez rescind her formal apology to Judge Duncan, (2) place permanent restrictions on what speakers the Federalist Society can invite to campus and what topics can be discussed, and (3) expel the school’s current FedSoc board members (this last, apparently, is just to be sure).

 

It must be emphasized how direct the confrontation between the Stanford administration and its students has become: Martinez is a professor in addition to her duties as dean, and after her apology to Duncan her Constitutional Law class was protested by an eerie horde of law-student activists (the same cadre that disrupted the original event, one imagines) who ringed the perimeter of her class silently, wearing masks, after papering the blackboard with appallingly erroneous understandings of free speech as both law and ethos. One imagines this escalation forced her hand.

 

Dean Martinez responded today by lowering the boom in a ten-page memorandum addressed to the student body: She has decided it’s time to send the entire Stanford Law School class to reeducation camp. I’m only half-kidding! And in a surprising twist, the mandatory training day she has set for all students isn’t a DEI initiative, quite the opposite in fact: It’s an instructional course on how the heckler’s veto is illegitimate, and how one must tolerate and reckon with opposing opinions both as a virtue in and of itself, but also because one will be an appallingly poor lawyer unless one develops this basic mental discipline.

 

Martinez’s memorandum is, in all substantive respects, an excellent defense of the principle of free speech, free inquiry, and minority rights, as well as closely argued on the legal merits. She does not stop at a grudging acknowledgment of the right of people like Judge Duncan to be heard uninterrupted; in fact, a strain of near disbelief filters through her carefully chosen words, as she keenly emphasizes how antithetical the students’ behavior is to the spirit of free inquiry. (Her contempt for the behavior of associate DEI dean Tirien Steinbach, now on leave, is barely concealed.)

 

But there is something wildly unsettling about Stanford Law, one of the most prestigious legal institutions in America, having to send its entire student body to remedial civic education because its members have either foresworn all previous norms of acceptable conduct or were so poorly formed that they don’t even realize there’s something important they failed to learn in the first place. These are supposed to be the next generation of Great Legal Minds, the elite of the elite, and they apparently need to have it patiently explained to them that using mob tactics and social-pressure campaigns to silence your enemies is not kosher.

 

Martinez’s tone alternates between patient pedagogy (it is both ghastly and comedic to read her walking her students like toddlers through concepts like “it’s wrong to just censor the Federalist Society because they are right-wing”) and hopeless appeals to a pluralism alien to her students. There is something pathetically touching about her attempt to remind the obstreperously self-righteous LGBTQ activists on campus that they are in fact the dominant party and that they are cynically attempting to crush the tiny minority of students in the Federalist Society. It is touching because they already know this, and they do not care. They consider that the right and proper order of things.

 

Stanford Law has issued a fine statement of principle as far as it goes (the devil’s in the details as far as living up to it). But it is impossible not to also read it as a warning: a hard line laid down by a startled older legal generation only finally awakening to the realization that, due to years of corruption of norms in education, the kids are not alright.