The Volokh Conspiracy
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David Lat on the Stanford Law School Disruption of Speech by Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan
David Lat's Original Jurisdiction newsletter has, as usual, excellent and detailed coverage. I started quoting but then realized that I couldn't excerpt it and still do the matter justice; and quoting the whole thing would be unfair to Lat as an author. I therefore very much encourage you to read the whole thing there; here are the opening paragraphs:
As I first learned via this detailed Twitter thread and subsequent Bench Memos post by Ed Whelan, yesterday Judge Kyle Duncan of the Fifth Circuit was the subject of a highly disruptive protest when he spoke at Stanford Law School. I have received extensive information about the event from multiple sources at or affiliated with SLS, as well as Judge Duncan himself, whom I interviewed by phone, and I'll share it with you now. I also reached out to Stanford Law, but have not yet heard back; I will update this story (or write a new one) if and when I do.
On Thursday, March 9, Judge Kyle Duncan (5th Cir.) was invited to speak at Stanford Law by the Stanford Federalist Society. The title of his talk, scheduled to run from 12:45 to 2:00 p.m., was The Fifth Circuit in Conversation with the Supreme Court: Covid, Guns, and Twitter. Whether or not you agree with the rulings of the very conservative Fifth Circuit—and, for the record, I disagree with many of them—the opportunity to hear from a sitting federal appellate judge about his court's jurisprudence is why students go to places like SLS….
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression also had a letter to Stanford about this, and posted the Stanford administrator's remarks at the event (a separate document from the e-mail the administrator had distributed before the event).
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Which organizations handle misconduct by employees in a better manner -- Mexican drug cartels or American conservative organizations?
Kirkland, be damn careful about what you ask for because you might just get it.
People forget that Hitler won a plurality in a basically fair election because of the Communists, who were seen as the worse of two evils.
They still are.
“Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.”
Yoel Roth
Are you calling Republicans Nazis?
(Nazis only got 43.9% of the vote in 1933, and that was after a notorious campaign of terror, intimidation and propaganda, and Nazi 'vote monitoring.' Hitler was appointed Chancellor, not elected. It's like the Nazis were really good at ruthlessly gaming the system and manipulating cowardly centrists who pretended they were acting in good faith.)
What I will get is more cultural victory as America continues to progress in line with my preferences.
And more whining from the railing-and-flailing, muttering-and-sputtering conservative casualties of that culture war. Until there aren't enough right-wing bigots left to maintain a solid antisemitic or racist chant or a noticeable anti-gay or science-disdaining campaign, of course.
NPC Alert.
It's interesting watching people on the left try to deflect blame. They are trying so hard, you have to feel just that tiniest bit of sympathy for them. At least they're making an effort.
Deflect blame for what? A bunch if kids disrupting a meeting? The massive towering edifice of The Legal System isn't going to crumble, and can crush them like ants if it's brought to bear.
For the culture of fascism infecting the American left. And yes, you are as much an apologist for it as RAK, and for your it's worse, since you should know better.
Fascism is selling off public services in a massive fire sale, targeting minorities with hate, and actually believing your dear leader is going to save you from the evil pedophile satanists. Having a shouting match at a talk is something that was probably happening in caves during the Stone Age.
Ah yes, irrelevant deflection. Just what one might expect from RAK,
Still nothing much involving expression and/or academic freedom in Florida that interests Prof. Volokh or this blog?
#KissingDeSantAss
Rev. Sandusky, when my natural children were much younger and would start whining all the time (like you do) I would send them to take a nap. Do you need a nap?
Yeah, see above. Wave a little harder, there, Rev. "These aren't the droids you're looking for."
Open wider, DaveM.
NPC Alert.
Could someone translate from incel to English?
NPC Alert.
Well maybe he shouldn’t have needlessly wrote an opinion violating Judicial Canon 3(A)(3) so he could cruelly demean a litigant. Asshole judges who go out of their way to be assholes for no reason do far more to damage to the credibility of the legal profession than the students did. Those students will probably have relatively mundane but successful legal careers and not be remembered goodly or badly. He on the other hand will be widely remembered as a colossal dick. Sucks to suck.
If he's such a bad judge, why not protest him suitably, by raising a disruption in his courtroom?
He’s a federal circuit judge. He never has to interact with anyone. His chambers are hidden and there is no courtroom to protest in. The only time he will ever face public backlash is at things like this. If he wants to dish it out he better be prepared to take it when he leaves his safe space.
“there is no courtroom to protest in”
Look at the two-minute mark in this video, see if you can detect it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FF6LZ3SeEE
Of course, disrupting the court while in session could affect your freedom and your right to practice law, but that's a small price to pay for showing what an awesome Social Justice Warrior you are.
His chambers are actually in Baton Rouge. The Fifth Circuit is headquartered in New Orleans. Also appellate courtrooms don’t belong to any one judge.
Well, then, disrupt the court while he’s hearing a case on one of the 5th Circuit panels.
The Stanford students could do that on spring break – just to show how much they care for the oppressed, and their willingness to sacrifice their freedom and careers for the sake of marginalized groups.
There was free food at this event, so they could mooch before they busted it up. The 5th ain’t gonna feed them.
Three hots and a cot.
I should emphasize that I am employing *sarcasm* to make a point - if disrupting a court proceeding is wrong (and it is), how can it be right to disrupt a school event, especially for lawyers-in-training who are supposedly being trained *not* to have such outbursts?
Different things are different. Courts aren’t schools and aren’t public talks. In any event, I don’t even know or care if it’s right or wrong to disrupt school events.
I do know the reaction from the powerful about being yelled at is so damn whiny and pathetic. Like “oh noes they were mean to the federal judge who is needlessly
cruel to litigants and thinks it’s a okay to be in prison past your sentence. What’s our society coming to!?”
This is not a single incident, and these incidents don’t exclusively involve federal judges, or people with power, and they don’t all occur on campus.
But when these Red Guards have a chance to violate the rules and commit a disruption, they do so in a place which isn’t enthusiastic about enforcing the rules against them.
Thus, they are bullies – and so they’re going to attack whenever they think they can get away with it, not just when they’re Speaking Truth To Power and challenging some high-ranking, prestigious (alleged) evildoer.
And of course, disrupting a speaker is a form of prior restraint – doing what they can to stop the target from speaking on *any* subject.
Fascinating to watch these hypocritical clingers get riled by a group of tourists conducting a mostly peaceful protest on their own campus.
Yes, you got me, I’m a fervent supporter of the Capitol riots.
OK, technically, I’m against riots, right, left and militant moderate.
But I’m just as bad as an actual riot supporter because I think people who haven’t been convicted should have the right to bail. Which is a position only a fascist would take.
Entitled to bail?
When why all the hubbub about contributions to bail funds, or the abolition of cash bail?
I’ve said before that “abolition of cash bail” will increase the inequalities (you might say “inequities”) in the system by creating two classes of defendant – those released with minimal supervision because they merely endanger the poor and uninfluential, and those kept without bail because they are believed to endanger the rich and powerful.
Because one group of defendants you don't like is held without bail, you can't raise yourself above partisanship to see the broader systemic problems.
Wiemar Republic.
How'd that work out for the left?
You're more scared of some kids raising their voices and being silly than of a notional rise of Nazism?
“The asshole makes decisions I don’t like so he needs to be shut up and punished.” I bet you have a First Amendment urinal cake in your toilet so you can express your political opinion every time you take a kiss.
Quite the freedom lover you are.
The students have first amendment rights too. Also Duncan can’t be shut up. He gets to fill the federal reporter with whatever nonsense he wants and there’s nothing anyone can of about it. Lawyers and others are forced to listen and adhere to his words because they become law. Believing that a federal circuit judge is being silenced is incredibly fucking dumb.
So, I suppose you're against disrupting speeches if the speaker is a private citizen?
I actually think the whole debate about speeches and hecklers is kind of a tedious philosophical circle jerk for privileged lawyers and pundits. Especially in the internet age when it’s so freaking easy to have access to anyone’s views who wants to put them out there.
I mean there are going to be tons of article, posts, op-eds, and comments about this. But the biggest free speech whiners aren’t out there complaining about Nieves v Bartlett for instance. (Or about that time Stanford Fed Soc students tried to derail their classmate’s graduation because he made fun of FedSocin a listserv. Even Eugene was making excuses for their reprehensible behavior claiming they didn’t know better)
My liberty is put at much more risk by saying the wrong thing about a cop or a whiny (and connected) FedSoc student than it is by being around an activist Stanford student.
“Especially in the internet age when it’s so freaking easy to have access to anyone’s views who wants to put them out there.”
On that point, please recall that there's been some Internet censorship going on lately.
It's not as if it's only evil elites being censored.
What’s so funny about that? It’s obviously correct. Anyone can find Duncan’s opinions online or watch his speeches in friendlier venues.
I mean I am inundated with right wing views all the fucking time from being online. They’re literally inescapable. Even if you don’t seek it out.
I’m sorry to hear that.
Expanding on my point (and I edited my previous remark before you replied), this is like the attack on Steven Pinker – attack someone high up in status and send an unmistakable message to everyone – “whether your status is high or low, you must conform to our preferences or be punished.”
No one was punished: he was mocked and criticized. Stop being such a whiny baby about this shit. Jesus.
You seem to have missed my point – they’ve shown their fangs, they’re not going to limit their attacks to supposed elites, the attitude they display will be turned against more humble people who don’t have Judge Duncan’s protections.
The authorities at Stanford seem to have (albeit belatedly) become "whiny babies" about this disruption, too, in the sense of criticizing it.
Okay, I’ll bite. When do you envision being shouted down at an elite college? Because it’s probably only going to happen to people with elite connections. I don’t know too many randos who get to give talks at Stanford.
I mentioned Internet censorship. It's not limited to people with Ivy League connections.
I certainly hope you're not claiming that only elite people need fear these sorts of attacks.
Who is being censored online?
OK, Rip Van Winkle, maybe these articles can get you up to date:
https://reason.com/search/twitter%20files/
Lol. Lmao. Thought it would be something dumb like that.
I mean Twitter is private they can do what they want. They have rights too and they can host or not host whatever they want. The right wing complaint is truly on the level of “mom says you have to let me play with you.”
No, it’s more like “Big Brother doesn’t want you to see certain things on the Internet.”
And by "Big Brother" I mean the government, not spontaneously-arrived-at private decisions.
Margrave, you are even wrong about Big Brother. If Twitter wants to knuckle under to government criticism, the 1A empowers it to knuckle under to its heart's content. If Twitter thinks knuckling under is a wise business tactic, and prefers to prioritize business, they get to do that. If you have a complaint, it is against government. To make that stick, you have to show not government pressure, but government coercion, which nobody has shown. I will leave it to lawyers to say in such a case whether some right-wing rando gets standing to bring a case like that. It might be only Twitter, for all I know.
"It might be only Twitter, for all I know."
https://reason.com/2023/01/19/facebook-files-emails-cdc-covid-vaccines-censorship/
"But it was only government pressure, not government coercion!"
"My liberty is put at much more risk by saying the wrong thing about a cop or a whiny (and connected) FedSoc student than it is by being around an activist Stanford student."
That's the perk of being a political ally, I assume.
Whenever this bullshit happens it’s always the same old rationalization from the left. Because somehow, y’all have become more illiberal than the right, which would have seemed impossible even 10 years ago. But it’s true.
Because a lot of them never cared about the rights of minorities, they just pretended to because they WERE a minority at the time. And, sure, a lot of them were sincere, too, but just not passionately enough to push back against the first group, so the first group prevails.
You see that in the history of the ACLU: Founded by communists to protect the rights of communists, but to protect them by protecting everybody's rights, so it wouldn't be too obvious they only cared about the communists. And a lot of people joined thinking the mask was their real face.
But when the censorship started reliably coming from the left, not the right, the ACLU's tune changed. They put in charge of their litigation strategy a guy who'd made his fame gaming out how to overturn Citizens United, one of the ACLU's great victories. And they've openly admitted that they think whether somebody's rights are worth protecting depends on their politics.
When the first wave of left-wing campus intolerance hit, people thought, "It's just on campus, they'll outgrow it when they graduate." They didn't, they took it wherever they went, and now we're seeing most large companies hiring political officers, and an actual MAJORITY on the left think it's appropriate to hire and fire based on somebody's politics according to recent polls.
Now that's feeding back into the campuses, and the second wave of left-wing intolerance is building. The second wave won't be content with shutting people up or getting them fired. The second wave is going to be violent. And it's not going to stay on campus any more than the first wave did.
“Unrestricted free speech, paradoxically, results in less speech, not more.”
Yoel Roth
hint: The "liberals" aren't really liberal.
What do you call people who disrupt their political opponents' speaking events? Fascists.
What do you call people who tacitly (or, as in the case of Associate Dean Steinbach, explicitly) support / encourage fascists? I'd call them fascists too.
It’s always the same old hysterical chicken little-ing by the right over a minor college kerfuffle that silences no-one while they cheerfully remove books from libraries, suppress black scholarship and pass laws against trans people.
'Because a lot of them never cared about the rights of minorities,'
Trans rights, 'wokism' and 'CRT' have all been monstered by the right in order to attack minorities and you all wail like stuck pigs because you get criticised for it.
"cheerfully remove books from libraries, suppress black scholarship and pass laws against trans people."
School libraries are run by the government. Who should control the content?
Black scholarship? That is, of course, a lie.
Pass laws against trans people? Also, a lie.
Is lying a sacrament of some sort for you?
Nope, these are all true. Aren't these what DeSantis will be running on if he gets nominated? Aren't these all Republican priorities now? Won't get far if you keep denying him like this.
"Nope, these are all true. "
Precisely zero are.
"Aren’t these what DeSantis will be running on if he gets nominated?"
No.
"Aren’t these all Republican priorities now? Won’t get far if you keep denying him like this."
Your ignorance is only matched by the certainty of your ignorance.
DeSantis is going to have a hard time if even Republicans are too embarrassed and ashamed of his actions to admit to them.
Feel free to be upset if somebody is unwilling to accept your erroneous framing.
" He gets to fill the federal reporter with whatever nonsense he wants and there’s nothing anyone can of about it. "
No, there is -- they can ask their Congresscreature to impeach him.
You and yours are no better than the mobs that shut down courthouses -- and that's coming...
Remember when there was tons of support round here for a bunch of truckers bringing an entire city to a halt not so long ago.
You mean because their rights were being actively suppressed, not because somebody dared to disagree with them?
Yup, same thing. Just like shooting somebody trying to kill me is identical to just shooting somebody who was walking down the street. Exact. Same. Thing.
See? The right support stuff that's way more disruptive, damaging and objectively stupid than this.
"See? The right support stuff that’s way more disruptive, damaging and objectively stupid than this."
Can somebody with an IQ in at least double digits correspond?
Not you, then?
Thank goodness you are here to determine when protests are for Good Things and when they are for Bad Things.
You should be consistent in what means of protest are okay and which are not, regardless of whether you agree or disagree as to the end-goal.
"Thank goodness you are here to determine when protests are for Good Things and when they are for Bad Things."
It's pretty simple, really.
Kill dozens of people = bad.
Do not kill dozens of people = far less bad.
Cause billions in damage = bad.
Do not cause billions in damage = far less bad.
I don't see how this is that complex a thought process to engage in, but I've been disappointed in the intellect of others before.
A bunch of kids protesting a talk does none of those things, so, yay!
All we need is for ALL speakers to be shouted down from now on.
Not at the Volokh Conspiracy, where principles related to expression flutter with the right-wing winds and Federalist Society preferences.
'needs to be shut up and punished'
Gasp! How dramatic!
"If he’s such a bad judge, why not protest him suitably"
Why protest at all?
You'd think that a bunch of wanna-be lawyers could ask him tough questions about his decisions.
As law students, seriously asking him to explain himself and his decisions would be more effective than disrupting the speech.
Better optics too.
These students are fascists-in-training and will go on to be a danger to all of us. I’m sure you think somehow you’ll be immune, but you’ve got a nasty surprise coming when the fecal matter hits the rotating blade.
I don’t think these students believe that the diseased nation needs a rebirth from crisis into what it was in glorious heroic/mythic past through the leadership of a hypermasculine strongman using popular ultranationalism and paramilitary violence.
They believe that every one of us should be intimidated into bending to their will. They’re worse for Liberty than he is.
You'll be allowed as much freedoms as your betters permit, and no more.
Okay. That’s not fascism though. Sooooo
It's fascism if they use corporations as an extension of the government, which IS what they've been doing in terms of censorship and surveillance.
Brett, I know you want a clean and easy definition of fascism, but that's not actually what the word means.
No. It’s not. Read a book by an actual historian or political science for once instead of believing your engineering degree makes you an expert in all things. It doesn’t.
Among other problems, there is an ultra-nationalist element to fascism that seems to be completely missing here.
Instead there is an anti-nationalist element.
In this new form of soft fascism they fundamentally hate the country they live in, and they demand the rest of us hate it too.
Which is very very far from actual Fascism. You should probably use a different term, rather than label something fascist that is actually its opposite. Terms like that get used for their derogatory sting, and so become meaningless, like communist.
That's hilarious. You're not even wrong, it's just that you're only concerned with the tiniest, narrowest sliver of government-corporate partnership that may or may not affect conservatives who aren't supposed to be affected by any of this.
It’s the word definition game. You’re supposed to get caught up in word definitions and forget about how they’re horrible people.
Also FWIW:
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/21/21-30625-CV0.pdf
Here’s Duncan joining an opinion granting QI when the plaintiff was held for years after his sentence expire.
Real Liberty lover that one.
I agree that he’s an anti-liberty asshole. The problem is that you’re not in a position to complain because you and yours are anti-liberty assholes too. Your complaint and the students’ complaint would have some validity except that y’all are as opposed to liberty as he is.
The wise man bowed his head and said There’s zero difference between good and bad things.
Seriously: even granting that heckling a powerful person endangers liberty for all it’s not as bad as shrugging your shoulders at someone literally being imprisoned for too long. Not all deprivations of and threats to liberty are the same. And it is ridiculous to treat them as equivalent as you do here.
The zealot bows his head and said “If I believe it, it is Good and Right. Anyone who doesn’t believe it is the Devil Incarnate and should be driven from society”.
This isn’t heckling one person. Speech that progressives disfavor is being attacked by many methods all across the country. Everyone must think right or else. You complain about growing fascism but the only time you actually see one is when you happen to glance at a mirror.
When I look in the mirror I don’t see someone who believes that the diseased nation needs a rebirth from crisis into what it was in glorious heroic/mythic past through the leadership of a hypermasculine strongman using popular ultranationalism and paramilitary violence.
To whatever extent we’re diseased and in a crisis, it’s people with your attitude that’s driving the problem. You’re filled with hate and scorn. I’m not.
No we’re not diseased and in a crisis. That’s a key part of the fascist pitch. You really need to read up.
And I’m not filled with hate. But I do scorn hateful people who exercise power in a hateful way and expect to be praised for it. That’s a good and healthy thing to do.
When you look in the mirror you see someone who believes that the diseased nation needs a rebirth from crisis into a glorious heroic/mythic future full of equity and racial retribution using agents provocateurs, struggle sessions and paramilitary violence.
I just don’t think mean-spirited reactionary morons should wield the tremendous amount of political power they do, considering it’s a minority position. You can accomplish that in a number of ways that don’t involve paramilitary violence.
You’re filled with hate and scorn. I’m not.
Right, bevis. You're full of beans.
In other words, your just a poor trotskyite waiting for a stalin to wipe you out.
Read a book or some articles about fascism so you use it correctly. It’s not: thing I don’t like. Its not even authoritarian or totalitarianism or repressive political regimes. It’s a very specific mode of politics that has identifiable characteristics that are not the same as the politics of the Stanford students. Or me. Self-described fascists would not see me or those students as ideological allies. Nor would those who practice this kind of politics without self-identifying as fascist.
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/the-fascism-debate-e72
Here are some good posts by an author who takes the subject seriously and will refer to scholarship on the subject.
So, if you can "non-fascistly" disrupt your opponents' speaking events, can you also have "non-fascist" concentration camps for your opponents?
Fascism has two sides, the economic and the social. Left-wingers always focus on the social side of it, because if they look at the economic side it's too much like staring into a mirror.
Ed: yes. Communist countries do that. doesn’t make them fascist.
Brett,
Where did you get this definition? Which historian or social scientist has posed this as a definition? If you made it up which primary source documents were you reading to come to this conclusion? Did you translate them? Did you do an extensive historiographical review to properly understand their context?
Also how do you have an answer for the fact that historically conservative and business interests aligned themselves with the fascists? Or that Marxists were highly critical of fascism from its very beginnings?
Again: you having an engineering degree doesn’t make you an expert on this or any other topic. Please for the love of god admit that you actually don’t know things, study up, and come back when you’ve learned something.
You're the one that used the words diseased and crisis. Problem is that you and your side and your twins on the zealous right are the disease.
And I don't give a shit about quibbling over definitions. Call it whatever you want, the people you sympathize with are trying to take away our liberty.
I used the words because that’s how fascists frame their pitch. That’s not the pitch the students are making
And the people you sympathize with are trying to destroy my gay friends’ marriages, trans people’s existence, control women’s bodies and put their lives at risk, and whitewash American history on top of a bunch of other threats to speech and human autonomy.
If you think, historically, that the only people to ever disrupt meetings and speeches and debates were fascists, you’re just thick.
'the people you sympathize with are trying to take away our liberty.'
They have taken away zero people's liberty.
Who do I sympathize with?
Obviously you don’t listen to me at all. I’ve said that I was in favor of gays being allowed to marry since I first heard it was an issue. Way ahead of people like H Clinton and Obama. It was a simple matter of freedom for me - damned if I can understand why the government can prohibit two adults from getting married.
So when you say I sympathize with people opposed to gay marriage it just shows the degree to which you actually pay attention to what anyone says and simply stereotype anyone who disagrees with you on anything.
You’re the problem.
Uh, the ‘sympathize’ line was a quote from your own comment above.
Pat yourself on the back for having basic levels of human decency, have a long hard look at yourself if you seriously think a bunch of kids protesting a college talk poses a fraction of the threat to people’s liberty this judge does. Students have been protesting stuff for a long time now, and they certainly aren’t doing it at remotely the level they used to, and there was plenty of pearl clutching about it then, too.
Yeah I knew LTG wouldn’t come back and say “yeah, you have been defending gay marriage. My mistake”. Because admitting error is not possible for a zealot.
Freakin’ chickenshit.
It is immaterial if you personally support it. You’re currently going out of your way to sympathize with a guy and others like him who want to destroy that. Seriously you’re going after the students as the threat to liberty and the things you support while defending the guys with the power to take it away!
THE STUDENTS ARE THE PEOPLE THAT ARE DENYING SOMEONE THE FREEDOM TO SPEAK. AND DENYING OTHERS THE FREEDOM TO LISTEN. SUPPORTED BY AN OFFICIAL OF THE UNIVERSITY.
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you? It hurts you that bad to let someone talk? I don’t agree with this guy on gay marriage but he can say whatever he wants. I’m also not worried about taking away your right to speak, although I’m comfortable that if you had the power you would not show me the same consideration.
And I neglected to mention, saying that trans women shouldn’t be allowed to compete athletically with biological women is not in any way “destroying their existence”. You’re so ate up with overwrought rhetoric that you aren’t credible.
How do you not understand the power dynamics here? You are being willfully obtuse. He’s a life tenured federal judge who whose words become law when he puts them in opinions that will be widely distributed for decades. He’s not being silenced.
He’s facing some no-name students. I mean come on. I don’t even think you believe what you’re saying. Simping for the powerful doesn’t make you a Liberty lover. It makes you a mark. A mark for a man who won’t hesitate to fuck you over if called for. You’re just so obsessed with both-siding things you can’t see the forest through the trees. And I don’t want you to stop speaking, you continuing to make yourself look like a credulous fool doesn’t bother me one damn bit. Have at it.
BTW in case you haven’t noticed anti-trans legislation and rhetoric has moved way beyond sports.
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/transgender-care-targeted-adulthood-states/story?id=97004686
Duncan was not the only person these thugs abused. What about their fellow students who tried to simply get out of the rain and eat breakfast but were chased out by threat of violence? What about the people that wanted to hear the judge speak?
All of those people were denied freedom by your angry, mildly violent mob with the support of a school official. Where does that shit fit on your power dynamic scale? I’m not the one being obtuse by saying the victims deserved it.
The power in the room was the DEI person. The judge is gone in a couple of hours and the student victims have no one to appeal to. You’re the credulous fool simping for power here, and everything you type demonstrates just how illiberal you are. At least i can see two sides, your brain is so addled by politics that you can’t think with that complexity.
"How do you not understand the power dynamics here?"
In other words, anything goes. Because… whatever reason. The conclusion will always be that anything goes. The reasoning will be whatever sounds good at this moment. An hour from now, maybe the exact opposite.
God you are tedious. Yes the fucking rando faculty member has more power than the life tenured judge. That’s what you’re saying and if you say it out loud or to a group of people you’ll sound incredibly dumb.
'In other words, anything goes'
DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER
Any comment about current developments in Florida from the conservative hypocrites found at the Volokh Conspiracy?
#KissingDeSantAss
You know that the case was a civil suit for damages after the fact, not a denial of release from prison, right? It was not a good decision, but it wasn't about liberty per se.
bevis, I am a vociferous advocate for expressive liberty, including liberty for right wing expression. And I still think the, "Twitter files," approach to a critique of internet expressive practices is looney. And worse than looney, actually. Right wingers really do show every sign of trying to get government to order a reserved place for their ideology in public discourse. That would be the opposite of expressive liberty.
It’s conservative anti-liberty assholes (also the kind of assholes who call themselves “often libertarian,” parading about in unconvincing libertarian drag) vs. liberal anti-liberty assholes. A tie.
That tie is broken, in modern America, thank goodness, by bigotry. This is why Republicans and conservatives are getting stomped in the culture war and at the marketplace of ideas.
Well, that and the childish superstition. But mostly it’s the old-timey bigotry.
Was Judge Duncan the one who hired the Turning Point racist before Judge Pryor did, or was that another one? It's sometimes difficult to distinguish these Federalist Societeers, especially the ones from the southern backwaters.
LTG, I read the opinion, thanks for that cite. The 'problem' is Taylor did not articulate a legal argument, correct? That is what I understood Judge Ho wrote in the opinion.
IOW, it was not keeping Taylor past his sentence expiration was wrong (it was totally wrong!), it was that there was no legal argument that was made other than, "this is wrong'. To pierce QI, you need a legal argument; Taylor had none. That is what I took away from the opinion.
It is terrible that even happens. That Secretary should be put in prison, and left there a few years after his sentence is done. See if he likes it.
https://reason.com/volokh/2022/03/22/the-question-i-would-ask-kbj-how-would-you-change-the-supreme-court-confirmation-process/?comments=true#comments
Just FYI, I’m not going to engage with someone who appears to have also viewed child sex abuse material and then speaks about it as “getting his freak on.”
It's easier if you link to the comment instead of the whole thread. That saves the rest of us a lot of time discovering your deliberate mischaracterization.
So, you're OK with accosting judges if you dislike their verdicts?
Good to hear.
No chance this will backfire.
'accosting'
Lol.
Again, you're not going to like these rules you are advocating for currently when they get turned against you.
See? You're the guy looking forward to some authoritarian opression given half a chance.
Fortunately the authoritarian oppression you like is already here. Congrats!
The judge? So it seems.
1. Any bad decisions by Duncan do not justify student or administration disruption of an event.
2. The decision you cute does not seem unreasonable.
The right to timely release is clearly established. But Taylor failed to adequately brief—and has thus forfeited—any meritorious argument that Secretary LeBlanc’s behavior was objectively unreasonable in light of that right. Accordingly, we must reverse.
Tough talk from a guy who has been complying with the preferences of those who have shaped American progress against conservatives' obsolete preferences and faux libertarians' disaffected efforts throughout his lifetime . . . and will continue to toe the line established by his betters. Until replacement.
The culture war has been settled. Clingers hardest hit.
You guys get to whine about it as much as you like, though, and the Volokh Conspiracy is here to whimper with you.
Hey, I said it first, you copycat.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/03/10/david-lat-on-the-stanford-law-school-disruption-of-speech-by-fifth-circuit-judge-kyle-duncan/?comments=true#comment-9963321
Actually, I believe the brown-shirts of the left will go for their own first. It's a bit too scary to seriously go after conservatives. Yes, you can heckle the right and shut down their speech, but other than that what can you really do to harm them? The left really are not going to invade the spaces of conservatives, they are too chicken shit to do so.
So, let the left suck up to the 20 something year old "social justice warriors", who are actually warriors over nothing. It really is amusing to watch grown mean cringe in fear of those students. Law professors tremble in fear that one will come after them so adjust their speech accordingly.
Those "warriors" actually run and hide in fear at the first sign of actual danger and escape to their safe spaces and call the cops (those hated cops) and file reports because their feelings were hurt. Does anyone really think they will do anything more than burn down inner city black communities which they do to show support for minorities?
I recall the videos of 2020, when they marched into a conservative subdivision area, and the locals beat the crap out of many of them and sent them on their merry limping way. It was hilarious to watch!
Also hilarious: being on the right side of history and watching liberals shove even more modernity and progress down the racist, gay-basing, immigrant-hating, antisemitic, Islamophobia, childishly superstitious, half-educated, misogynistic, powerless throats of right-wing culture war victims. Winning that culture war never gets old. Republicans and conservatives will have to take my word for it, of course. They will never understand that thrill of victory.
Wrong, the brown shirts of the left, (Who actually wear black shirts...) will take over basic social institutions like banks, and then use THEM to go after the right, not by marching in with Molotov cocktails, but by denying them banking services, lowering their credit scores, making them unhireable.
Any physical fight comes last.
Brett, they've been doing this for 20 years now -- look at the bios of the Jan 6th protesters. People don't realize that it is what motivated a lot of them.
They are building a subclass of people who are very dangerous because they literally have nothing much to loose.
Is the dangerous subclass truckers? I'll bet it's truckers.
'People don’t realize that it is what motivated a lot of them.'
Yes, the motivations of a bunch of people who believed, or claimed to believe, a lie about the election being stolen are fueled by paranoia, terror and conspiratorial thinking, such inflating a bunch of kids on a protest into an overpowering threat.
'The left really are not going to invade the spaces of conservatives, they are too chicken shit to do so.'
Antifa invade Nazi spaces all the time. BLM stood up to the heavily armed and protected power of the state. Meanwhile, Proud Boys protest people reading to children.
Aren’t the Proud Boys being prosecuted for Jan 6th?
I know we have a low view of politicians, but those weren't the children I was thinking of. On the other hand, Jan 6th was just a bunch of people on a walking tour of the Capitol, apparently.
"Meanwhile, Proud Boys protest people reading to children."
A lot of people protest strippers hanging out with children.
You seem to have confused drag queens for strippers. If you need to rewrite the facts to be correct, you are in reality not correct.
At the Volokh Conspiracy, a bit of confusion concerning drag queens and strippers is understandable because of the lesbian-drag queen-transgendered-Muslim haze furiously created by this blog (attempting to mask the scent of hypocrisy and cowardice).
There is little appreciable difference. Both are inappropriate for children. I do not get why you feel it is so vital for young children to be shown drag shows, but that seems to be a weird kink you have.
Are you equally bothered by children being indoctrinated by adults -- ostensible adults, at least -- who teach them absolute fucking nonsense about fairy tales being true?
Adult-onset superstition is a terrible affliction, but it seems to me focused on gullible, poorly educated, backwaters-inhabiting dumbasses.
A lot of people who read to children have day jobs. Remember when George W Bush kept reading to children during the 9-11 attacks? I loathe the fucker, but even a monster like him knew better than to disrupt storytime.
Oddly, nobody gives a damn about drag when kids are not involved.
I know, weird, ain't it?
Support grooming. Sounds like a great idea.
Nobody gave a damn about drag queen story hour until you guys decided you needed a hate group.
The right have succefully persuaded you that any form of non right-wing activism and protest is fascism. I expect it wasn't that hard.
Sorry, months of burning down cities and killing dozens of people and causing billions of damage is dramatically worse than a few hours with no killings, nothing burned down, and a few thousand in damages.
5/29 was a far worse incident than 1/6.
Whoa, cities were burned down? Which cities did we lost in the Great BLM War?
Turns out, invading Congress to get at Congresspeople and stop them from the peaceful transition of power is bad even if you fail. And you know this, hence your zhuzhing up what happened after Floyd's death to some kinda apocalypse.
"Whoa, cities were burned down? Which cities did we lost in the Great BLM War?"
Ah. If a single building remains, no burning occurred. Exceptionally odd standard, but you do you.
Hell, CNN did not even go so far as to claim nothing was burned down.
"Turns out, invading Congress to get at Congresspeople and stop them from the peaceful transition of power is bad even if you fail. And you know this, hence your zhuzhing up what happened after Floyd’s death to some kinda apocalypse."
Except, you know, they did not do that.
Meanwhile, on 5/29, the BLM mob did try to attack the WH.
But as you said yourself elsewhere, that’s like comparing shooting a guy to self defense. BLM were ptotesting against the heavily armed wing of state law enforcement who kill with impunity. Jan 6th claimed to believe a stupid lie about the election being stolen.
"Hands Up, Don't Shoot" is a complete lie.
Most things cops say are complete lies.
Not that, though. That was a lie told by a known liar and parroted by the Left, even when they were told by Obama's Justice Dept it was a lie.
Glad you agree that most cops are liars.
"BLM were ptotesting against the heavily armed wing of state law enforcement who kill with impunity."
They were seeking to burn the WH and kill the President.
Measures worse. And they did not get punished.
No they weren't, Trump's just a feeble coward.
So how did Secret Service agents get injured then?
Snorted too much coke? Tripped over a prostitute? Run over by a golf cart?
Now about the 1/6 "five dead police"?
How did the guard house get burned down? The 60 injuries?
But tell me more about the horror of insurrections.
Double standards.
You’re right. I hold Circuit judges with immense power to a higher standard of conduct than students. That’s a good thing.
That would be a good rebuttal if federal circuit judges were the only ones being disrupted.
I mean it is the subject of the post. And my comment. So thanks for pointing out that my rebuttal was good.
The post shows us the tip of the iceburg.
Margrave, the rest of the iceberg is mostly demands for a government-ordered place in public discourse for right wing commentary. That is not a demand for expressive liberty.
My brother, that is truly an interesting story.
The post shows us a right-wing law professor's partisanship, hypocrisy, and disaffectedness. There is not much more to it, although that doesn't stop FreeRepublic, RedState, Instapundit, Fox News, Newsmax and the rest of the clingerverse media from conducting strenuous mining operations.
During the Q&A time (after not allowing the Judge to present his prepared speech), a student's question was:
"I fuck men, I can find the prostate," one student asked, according to Rosenberger. "Why can’t you find the clit?"
Now, any attorney here, explain to me how this young she/he/it exhibits the professionalism that is expected for attorneys to have when addressing judges? If you say it is fine, tell me if you would address the Bench in such a manner?
These students could have had the opportunity to learn something from this judge, even if they disagreed with some of his rulings. Not only did they refuse to respectfully listed to his speech, they prevented those that wanted to learn from listening to him as well. Would you want the above person representing your firm in Court? I hope the federal judges learn his name and blackball him not only from a clerkship position, but also from admittance to practice law in their Court!
We truly have the inmates ruling the crazy house! And those that were in charge are just as nut-so. The administrators, every single one that sat in that room without stopping the behavior of the students, should be fired today. Especially the D.I.E. administrator who sided with the students. No reception, no flowers, no doughnuts, and definitely no damn watch!
It's too bad that Elizabeth Nolan isn't an attorney. She could hire this "it" as a law clerk. It would be a two-fer for her. A sexually confused it/and an ignorant idiot as well! Just up her ally (so to speak)! I'm sure it's two dads are proud of it's success and consider it money well spent to pay it's way at Stanford since "it" is now someone else's problem.
And "it" is a problem indeed!
Right-wing judges hire clerks who are gay-bashing bigots and use vile racial slurs. Does that bug you, clinger?
This is why your fate will be replacement, by your betters.
Arthur, was the question the student asked, "I fuck men, I can find the prostate. Why can’t you find the clit" appropriate to direct to an invited guest, a sitting circuit court judge?
You tell me.
I dislike the described conduct.
How do you feel about Republican and conservative judges and law professors regularly using vile racial slurs, engaging in shabby gay-bashing, and being, hiring, and appeasing reprehensible bigots (xenophobes, misogynists, Islamophobes, etc.) in myriad other ways?
Which problem is more important, in your judgment?
Both are pretty damned bad, Arthur; 100%, no debate. One exception: I don't have a problem with a law professor using a vile racial slur in the course of their formal teaching when the subject matter they are teaching has those vile racial terms.
Why do you choose to perpetuate it? You're an intelligent man. You can argue very effectively, when you want to. I have actually howled in laughter at some of your posts. Decent taste in music.
I am glad we agree about the inappropriateness of the question; I figured we would agree on that.
How often could a law professor use a vile racial slur before you concluded that the usage was (or might be) a problem rather than a benign teaching tool?
Pro tip: The proprietor of the Volokh Conspiracy really, really wants you to pick something north of 15 times a year.
Yeah, that is a tougher question Arthur. I am being serious.
I mean, how do you pick cases that use vile racial slurs at a higher rate than your peers as teaching examples, but make it look like you are no different in terms of racial attitudes? Can you...really? I tend to think you'd 'out' yourself in other ways. Sort of like the antisemites do (they cannot help themselves). Realistically, what can you do....a lot of lawyers are going to hear vile racial slurs in the course of their professional job. As a law student, you'd better a) get exposed, and b) learn how to deal with it in a professional setting.
Is it north of 15? 100? I honestly do not know, Arthur; it depends entirely on other factors. But I figure that one exception I noted is one I would make.
The habitual use of vile racial slurs isn't the only evidence of a problem in this case. Not nearly.
That record does constitute sufficient evidence.
But it is not the sole evidence.
"Now, any attorney here, explain to me how this young she/he/it exhibits the professionalism that is expected for attorneys to have when addressing judges?"
You are missing the bigger point — this was a unique opportunity for them to convince the judge that he was wrong in some of the decisions they so disagree with.
Heaven forbid that young wannabe lawyers actually plead their case.
And while he wouldn’t have changed there & then, he would have left there wondering if maybe — possibly — there might be some merits to the arguments of the other side. And he’d be thinking about that when the *next* case hit his desk.
Instead, all they managed to accomplish was to affirm his prejudices and — if anything — push him to even more extreme positions.
This is what I truly do not understand about the left — it either is that *they* don’t believe in the merits of their arguments or they’re too drunk on power to think rationally, but they’re sabotaging their own cause. Maybe they're just stupid...
They're not stupid. They know they can't win on the merits, so they're focusing on winning by intimidation and violence.
Years ago I read a quote, wish I could find the original. But the gist of it is that the most elevated and sublime ideas can be defeated by just dragging anyone who voices them into a nearby alley and beating them with a rubber hose.
THAT is how the left plans on winning the debate: With that rubber hose.
Wow, Brett's telepathy and crystal ball has uncovered that the left is evil yet again!
Jesus Christ, dude, with all this future persecution you should probably get out of the US.
This is some messed up fan fiction.
He so badly wants to be a victim. It’s so pathetic. He’s going to continue to live a very comfortable life and die at a very old age surrounded by loved ones yet still be absolutely convinced that’s he’s just minutes away from being placed in a concentration camp.
Kyle Duncan is a federal judge. He’s the instrument of violence here. He exercises powers of legal coercion over people.
Yes, he violently wields that pen of his!
"Kyle Duncan is a federal judge. He’s the instrument of violence here. He exercises powers of legal coercion over people."
IF you truly believe that, re-read what Machiavelli wrote about leaving no living enemies.
Unless you have the power to destroy Judge Duncan, you really don't want to wound him because all you are accomplishing is to make him an even bigger threat to all which you value.
While he probably interacts with members of the LBGTQ community on a daily basis without even knowing it, and likely has some personal respect for more than a few individuals, that crude she/he/it talking about prostrates is going to be what he envisions in the next gay rights case that comes before him. (Even if he isn't looking at some medical unpleasantries regarding his own prostate, as some middle-aged men are.)
All these adult-sized children did is make him more dangerous.
And the next time he speaks, he'll bring armed security with him and only his supporters will be allowed within a mile of the venue. And what will you have accomplished???
"Kyle Duncan is a federal judge. He’s the instrument of violence here."
Yet he did nothing.
Would you defend somebody for shooting Joe Biden if he did something to upset them? I mean, he is the ultimate power in this country and kills plenty of people (over 700,000 of COVID alone)
I agree, but then you could say the same thing about those who couldn't win a recent election "on the merits"...
(But I suspect you won't.)
Too soon!
'With that rubber hose.'
Metaphorically, presumably. All those Hunter Biden dick pics being taken down was the right's most elevated and sublime argument being beaten with a rubber hose.
Yup, the laptop was ONLY dick pics. Nothing else.
Watergate, by the same token, was just a two-bit robbery.
I remember when the Left claimed to care about political corruption. As expected, the only corruption they cared about was "anybody but ours"
What inside info! Other than dick pics, what’s on the laptop, and how do you know?
It's not like copies of the hard drive didn't go to multiple people. The FBI ignoring it hardly meant info did not exist. It just meant that, as usual, a leftist avoids punishment.
And plenty about business deals involving the current President and his son. Try and do a little bit of research.
Isn't Hunter Biden under investigation? Hasn't absolutely nthing incriminating surfaced from the laptop?
If it's anything but dick picks and anodyne work e-mails, that has yet to emerge.
And if there is anything birthers understand, it's the merits!
> explain to me how this young she/he/it exhibits the professionalism that is expected for attorneys to have when addressing judges?
The goal is to have attorneys (and eventually judges) that base their actions on the pure zealot-like belief in the Left's ideology, not the rule of law.
In which case, this young person exhibits the exact "professionalism" desired.
As for being a judge, well that isn't important if you're right-wing. In fact, in that case you need to be driven out of your position of power.
I expected this from Kirkland, but not from you.
An I'm not sure that those students are going to *have* careers because people are getting fed up with young fascists like them.
Look at what happened to the legal profession 50 years ago -- it's going to happen again.
Read a book on what fascism is. Please for the love of god.
Read a left-wing book on what fascism is, you mean, because they're all written to avoid noticing the left's fascist tendencies.
IT IS A LEFT WING SEMANTIC COVERUP.
No. Read a book by historians and political scientists about the subject. Like Griffin or Paxton or Payne or any scholars of the Holocaust. If it happens to seem like a left-wing thing that might be because the facts as uncovered by people who study this for a living are on their side.
Don’t read books by non-expert charlatans recommended by arrogant engineers who pretend to be experts in every topic under the Sun when it’s so painfully obvious they have zero clue what they’re talking about. Why can’t you simply admit you’re out of your depth on so many topics especially when it’s shown over and over and over again?
” Read a book by historians and political scientists about the subject.”
I have — along with taking courses in political theory, it’s why I object to leftists being called “liberals.”
The Soviet Union under Stalin & Brezhnev was a fascist state, not so much under Khrushchev.
What is the difference between fascist and authoritarian, Ed?
“Soviet Union under Stalin & Brezhnev was a fascist state.”
So you got an F in European history and political theory? Thanks for sharing lol.
Also I don’t think the guy who believes women slaves weren’t whipped is a credible source for reliable historical information.
Someone doesn't know that Nazi stood for "National Socialism."
Hint: Read the West VA decision and you will see Jackson refer to the "ongoing battle against National Socialism."
How often when you say this do you get the 'Is the Democratic People's Republic of Korea a Democracy' rejoinder?
Because it dismantles this awful, awful attempt at a point.
LTG,
Not such a stretch to call Stalin fascist. In the terminology of Lenin, Stalin was a right-wing opportunist. He promoted his cult of personality. Was as ultra-nationalist about Mother Russia as Hitler was about the Fatherland. The NKVD was as ruthless as he Gestapo. BUT Stalin did not let his cronies own the factories, he merely let them run the factories as autocrats. And to make production look good, he turned a blind eye at off-the books, off-hour production.
So go ahead and read multiple history books and see how close the kids at Stanford are to what Lenin called infantile leftists.
Nationalism is a curse.
Did you just make up a vast historiographic conspiracy to confound your desire to label fascism as left-wing?
“Vast historiographical conspiracy”
That’s amazing.
Yes, yes, but language changes...
Out of curiosity, which "more appropriate" pejorative term would you apply to those students?
Language changes but that doesn’t mean the characteristics of fascism has. It hasn’t.
You can call them whatever you want. But if you call them fascists you’ll just be wrong.
That wasn't very helpful.
The universe has a solution, however: people will continue to misuse the term "fascist" until a better term comes along. And if that doesn't happen soon enough, the "correct" definition will slide down the rankings until it is unceremoniously marked with an "obs."
I like your thinking, ONS.
My parents called their parents fascists back in the day. My brother called our parents fascist in his more rebellious moments. The word's use has absolutely expanded, but in a sort of empty direction.
Even as someone who believes the meaning of words shifts base on use, I'd argue that doesn't change the actual meaning any more than the overuse of Nazi changes what it means.
For now, though, those reaching for fascist as the top of their insult pile are going to be silly.
“All sheep and no shepherd, everyone is the same, everyone wants to be the same — anyone who is different goes voluntarily to the Madhouse.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
That is an example of fascism.
And it shows how Antifa are actually fascists.
Passing laws that victimise trans people - you know, people who are different but treated as at best 'mad' by people who claim to be 'normal' - is actual fascism, this is just a dumb campus protest.
I'm still unclear which laws have been passed that victimize trans people. Could you point out a few?
https://translegislation.com/
Trans people are mentally ill....
One in five adults in the US experience mental illness.
"I expected this from Kirkland, but not from you."
Same girl, different makeup.
Ooh, look. More of sarcastro’s DEI heroes in action - this time organizing a heckler’s mob to impose diversity on this son of a bitch. Letting him know what he needs to do if he wants to avail himself of that well known Stanford Law inclusion.
Of course Lat is a notorious Asian gay democrat practitioner of white supremacy, so his account of this is pure right wing propaganda. Right?
I mean he is an obsequious man obsessed with fawning over federal judges and other powerful people in the legal field. That’s been his whole career. So his accounts will always flatter power.
Well, gosh. This didn’t really happen then. The insipid statement from the Stanford DEI dean is fabricated. The video is a staged fiction.
Thanks. That’s a huge relief.
Just saying Lat is a simp for power. He’ll always spin it for power to look good.
He's always punching down - Yale Law School, Stanford Law School.
I mean he’s also a simp for T14s. Like the dude is obsessed with power and prestige and loves being next to and flattering it. In the end he’ll side with real power (life tenured judges) over potential cultural power (fancy law schools).
"potential cultural power (fancy law schools)"
If by "fancy" you mean "training grounds for our future rulers" then I agree with your choice of term.
Lets say things are exactly as you've laid out here...which is quite arguable.
I say DEI offices vary in their effectiveness and have both good and bad people.
You hear me saying all DEI offices are perfect and great.
This is a you problem, not a me problem.
You like your smokescreens. Always just enough BS to let the bad guys get away with anything, while you deny being their enabler.
Perhaps, for the sake of balance, we could have some articles about the good things these DEI offices are doing?
There’s no shortage of sympathetic media outlets which could run such articles – and they don’t even need to do much work, just set up an interview with the DEI officials who will tell them about all their wonderful achievements.
Does hyping race (or "bias") incidents that later turn out to be a hoax count as "good things"? DEI is good at that. Since the Obama Administration, most such incidents turn out to be hoaxes.
Or setting up illegally discriminatory events and then quickly backtracking when someone calls them on it. We see that about once a month these days.
You don't think there are articles about how well various orgs' diversity efforts are working?
Care to rethink that ask?
You can kiss my ask.
Some articles on the benefits of university DEI officials sure would enlighten my ignorance.
Literally every school with a DEI office has a link to news articles.
Like this?
https://diversityandaccess.stanford.edu/news/spotlight
Only one link to a strong, mainstream media outlet (Stanford Daily).
This one links to its own press releases:
https://diversityandinclusion.uchicago.edu/news/
Which answers your dumbass ask 'articles about how well various orgs’ diversity efforts are working.'
You want independent stories about DEI success stories? There are books about it!
It says a lot about your distorted worldview you think that DEI is so awful there is no such thing as a good news story about it.
I answered another commenter's request for more links on Internet censorship - although the information was obvious - so it's only fair you give me some sources backing up the glories of DEI offices.
And of course I rebutted your claim that "Literally every school with a DEI office has a link to news articles," since my request involved "media outlets," not an institution's own press releases.
I showed you where to find all the 'articles about the good things these DEI offices are doing/the benefits of university DEI officials' you want.
Your argument seemed to be that those articles didn't exist. We both now know they do.
No, I'm not going to go find them and link them to you - you and I both know how and where to find the, it would be a pointless exercise to establish something you already acknowledge.
I rebutted your claim that "Literally every school with a DEI office has a link to news articles."
First of all, you're an idiot if you take literally as meaning literally in this day and age. But you knew that, you're just being pedantic on the Internet.
Second, you *linked to 2 DEI news aggregation sections in 2 schools* so what are you talking about no link to news articles? Do you only want to see stuff in the Washington Post or something?
You might have noticed that my “ask” was about “media outlets.”
Yes, I’d actually like to see such stories, in order to get the establishment media’s idea of what these offices are doing. The existence of such stories wouldn’t surprise me. But your sweeping claim about every DEI school was far overstated.
Are you claiming that these stories are not true because they aren't linking to the 'establishment media?' Or that the fact that DEI offices functioning normally and not making headlines isn't something national news covers is somehow proof they never function normally?
You have no substantive thesis behind your goalposts.
Believe it or not, I’d really like to see how “media outlets” are covering the great things DEI offices are doing. “Functioning normally” could mean many things with outfits like those, it isn’t necessarily positive.
Maybe they have a study that the children of immigrants, black students, Jews, Asians, Latins, Indigenous-Americans, etc. only started coming in significant numbers after these offices were established. Then, for the benefit of reactionaries like myself, they could show that this was accomplished without racism (i. e., without discriminating against anyone because of race).
Or they could show that rape has gone down after DEI offices were set up (now that they’re conveyed the previously-withheld information that rape is wrong). Or maybe mental-health among students has improved, now that they can decide what sex they are and get affirmed.
The institutions should have to put out a bit more effort than merely releasing press releases; they should observe a patina of respect for impartiality by giving their stories to the media and letting the media at least pretend to investigate before regurgitating the press releases. Or maybe there’s a study like that Shape of the River stuff about how awesome some of the DEI policies are.
So many possibilities!
And since you have mastered the art of mind-reading, surely you’ve mastered the lesser art of finding evidence so support your thesis. I mean, which is more difficult – scanning the brainwaves of someone through the computer screen, or sourcing your own assertions?
I guess you're trying to argue that DEI offices are evil because of the lack of evidence they are not evil? Because that's some fallacious reasoning if I ever saw it!
You're demanding to see this arbitrary set of media institutions post dog bites man stories.
Or I guess stories about sociology studies?
The institutions should have to put out a bit more effort than merely releasing press releases;
Why? Are the press releases untrue? What does having a more or less robust public relations strategy have to do with anything?
they should observe a patina of respect for impartiality by giving their stories to the media and letting the media at least pretend to investigate before regurgitating the press releases.
This makes no sense. Like, it's saying that unless an institution is written up as worthwhile in the 'establishment press' it's not respecting the impartiality of the media? Do you even know how media engagement *works*?
Again, there is no material thesis behind what you're saying, just kind of an endless series of diaphanous objections with no there there.
SArc, if you cannot provide any evidence, you can just say so instead of blathering about nothing.
Don't start trying to substantiate your batshit crazy claims now, S_0 -- you might discover that many of the truths you cling to are just so much fiction.
"I guess you’re trying to argue that DEI offices are evil because of the lack of evidence they are not evil?"
This is remarkably silly even for you. I'm merely asserting the same thing you do below:
"There are plenty of cases of DEI offices being shitty."
I’ve pointed out why stories about an office functioning normally and doing well will not be as widely covered as an office messing up and causing misery.
You think you have this clever parallels, but you don't. That's why you keep shifting about an not declaring your thesis.
You are basically claiming dogs never bite people because the media never runs with those stories.
It’s very dumb.
Give it up, you already admitted:
“There are plenty of cases of DEI offices being shitty.”
Plenty of dog bites here, not that it would occur to *me* to compare DEI officials to dogs.
S_0 complains about other people not clearly stating their thesis while hiding his, which is that no amount of facts can ever amount to convincing evidence against the Discrimination-Envy-Incompetence industry.
Please enlighten us on all the good the $200,000 per year D.I.E administrators have done for colleges over the past five years?Besides take over that basement office space that no other department would agree to be housed in.
Can’t you enjoy the shit-quality conservative-controlled schools that still wallow in old-timely bigotry, superstition, dogma, nonsense, and stale thinking?
You mean how populations who previously weren't going to college in large numbers are now showing up, and our society gets that much broader a talent pool?
Or does that not count as a benefit to you.
CindyF was happier before the uppity women, uppity Blacks, uppity gays, uppity Muslims, uppity Jews, uppity Hispanics, and other "others" started interfering with The Lord Of The Bible Jesus Christ's divinely ordered plan for American society.
CindyF can't be replaced too soon. May the certainty of that replacement be a blessing for all of good will.
Yesteryear's academic rigor would be a bigger benefit to our society than diversity. Over just the last 15 years, the median and average quality of technical graduates from historically good schools has gone down markedly. Unfortunately, DIE people insist that diversity for its own sake is worth almost any cost.
The DEI offices at SVB worked out really well! Their head of Risk Management was an LGBTQP activist.
lmao
Let's not forget the success of a DIE department in hiring Sam Brinton, whose employment lasted almost six whole months!
Another DIE success-ure mode is to institute blatantly illegal discrimination, requiring another part of the government to order them to knock it off, as in https://www.fox5dc.com/news/virginia-ag-orders-cooper-middle-school-to-stop-racially-discriminating-against-children .
Firm DIE zealotry has also ensured that there is now a token POYC among the International Women of Courage awardees: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/twitter-laughs-groans-as-jill-biden-gives-biological-male-women-of-courage-award-up-your-game-ladies/ar-AA18ofgx
You always say that but at the end of the day this garbage keeps happening and you keep coming in to defend it.
And I'll bet you didn't even read Lat's post. He talked to a whole lot of people that were there. But no, it's arguable to you that people that were there actually observed what happened. The only reason it's arguable to you is because what happened doesn't fit your world view, which of course can't be changed for any reason.
This DEI person should be fired, Not out of cancellation for her views, but because she sucks at her job and because she clearly and knowingly violated university policy.
Do you see me defending this story, bevis?
If you find my asking for corroboration for an opinion piece a sign I'm defending this stuff, you've got a screw loose.
“It probably didn’t happen that way”.
I’ll take Lat’s witnesses description over someone like you who wasn’t there and wants to defend this idiocy at all costs. DEI does more harm than good but you don’t find a subset of the people being harmed worthy of sympathy so they can just pound sand.
Don't put shit in quotes I didn't say, asshole.
I have no idea how it happened, but I'm pretty consistent in asking for corroboration for opinion pieces about all sorts of things.
You know this.
DEI does more harm than good but you don’t find a subset of the people being harmed worthy of sympathy so they can just pound sand.
You keep saying this is true, but your support ends up being your own anger and that's about it.
“Let’s say things are exactly as you laid out here ….which is actually quite possible”. There you go. I paraphrased you accurately, but you want to simply argue.
The only thing you’re consistent at is assuming the Sarcastro Position - fingers in your ears, eyes squeezed closed, singing “lalalalala I can’t hear anything.
Lat, who is not an enemy of DEI or law schools, did a great job of talking to those involved and those who saw it all, including the hours leading up to it. Your diversity heroes wouldn’t even let the FS people come in out of the rain to eat breakfast in a common area. Champions of inclusion indeed.
But you prefer to be ill informed so you can defend it by claiming it didn’t really happen. Even though the DEI dean in her own statement was proud of the disruption. Whatever, man.
Do you know what arguable means?
You're insisting very hard I'm defending something I am not.
Quit it.
You keep bitching about more information but how are you going to get more information than that provided by someone who is fair minded and interviewed the people involved and people who witnessed everything? He even talked to the damn judge to get his perspective, which I found to be understandable (I guess) but he’s really thin skinned for a guy that lives in the public realm.
Yet you call it “arguable”. It’s your way of avoiding actually admitting that one of your precious DEI people screwed the pooch again.
You keep insisting I’m defending actions I am not.
YOU have a blanket hate-on for this entire group. I’m saying they’re varied like any other group. I’ve been pretty clear that I don’t think all DEI offices are great, and that some are pretty bad and do bad things. I’ve told you this a number of times. But that’s not enough for you. You want me to be as extreme as you are so you put words in my mouth.
My evidentiary standards are neither extraordinary nor inconsistent with how I’ve treated previous stories on anecdotes both on the right and the left. I am unwilling to take an uncorroborated opinion piece as gospel truth. I never have been.
one of your precious DEI people
DEI people include bad people and good people, like any other broad group. You’re being weird and bigoted, and trying to insist I’m the same way because you can’t seem to understand anything other than extremism on either side of this issue.
‘this garbage keeps happening’
I expect students will continue to do stuff like this until conservatives finally burn down the last university.
SHUT down, not burn down -- and that's coming...
It isn't like they need help making shit up to justify it.
You're hyperventilating.
No clerkships for you, Stanford Law.
Not among the federal bench's bigotry-and-superstition division, maybe.
Seems fair.
Two years ago 3 conservative Stanford students tried to stop a classmate from graduating because he made a parody flyer about the Federalist Society. They filed a false and bad faith disciplinary case with the school months after the fact to cause maximum damage to a fellow student.
That’s a much shittier thing to do than heckle a speaker. Yet they got to keep their clerkships.
The Volokh Conspirators and their fans wish you wouldn’t mention that.
These students did not just "heckle a speaker". They stopped him from speaking at all. Should both sides just now appear at any speech given by someone they disagree with and stomp their feet yell and scream to the point the speaker can't be heard? Heckling is one thing. Preventing a person from speaking and preventing those who attending from hearing the speech is totally another.
And what happened to your friend, does not excuse the actions of these disruptors at Stanford. At what point did our society decide that preventing speech, and some becoming violent when doing so, was actually free speech? I agree that protests should be allowed, but in order to protest a speech, the speaker should be allowed to give that speech.
If the side shutting down speech is always allowed to "win" by being the loudest then there is no free speech at all for one side is actually silenced. Basically, Stanford allowed a Heckler's Veto by the school administrator encouraging and allowing the students to shut out the speech of the judge. It would seem that would be a violation of First Amendment rights of the judge, those that invited him, and those that came to listen to him speak. It would seem they may be getting into the same area Oberlin College found themselves in, resulting in a large monetary judgement against them.
Not that I doubt what you are writing LTG, but do you have a cite or something about that? That seems pretty extreme = trying to stop a graduation.
I just want to be sure there isn't a little more to that story you are telling us. Some time ago, you and I engaged on Judge Pryor, and the false accusations that were made against him. I'd like to read more about those Stanford students.
You know that I will read what you have to say, with an open mind.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/email-mocking-stanford-s-federalist-society-nearly-cost-law-student-n1269514
I don’t know why LTG claims the Federalist Society members filed the complaint to try to stop the guy’s graduation — it seems more like the school is at blame for sitting on a complaint for two months without notifying the subject of the complaint. The school’s response there was markedly different than its response here: it rejected the complaints and pointed out that the original speech was protected under the First Amendment, rather than supporting the hecklers' veto.
They filed it in March two months after the incident. Clearly designed to cause maximum damage. And if you file a disciplinary complaint in the back half of the last semester you are clearly trying to derail someone’s graduation and career.
Also at no point did they retract the complaint when they found out what might happen or apologize to their classmate. They never admitted they were in the wrong.
I’m guessing they filed it in March after someone off-campus thought it was real and asked them what the f*** they thought they were doing having an event like that.
The kids really had no choice at that part but to file the charges, and blame Stanford for *having* those charges *to* file — lord knows that the left files charges like this on a routine basis.
And depending on who the upset off-campus person was, I can see spineless administrators doing nothing for two months, can’t you?
AND THEY WERE NOT IN THE WRONG! They hadn't written Stanford's policy no more than they wrote the bar regs -- and lawyers file complaints against other lawyers all the time...
When you write comments like LTG, you are clearly not a serious person.
Boy, ipse dixit makes arguments easy!
I read the email; I thought it was funny AF, when read as satire. Yeah, it cut a little close to the quick. That is what satire does.
A 60-day lag between a complaint being filed (3/27), and the school resolving it (5/27). I am just not seeing how the complaint was intended to halt a graduation. Why did Stanford take 60 days to resolve it? To me, it would take 60 seconds to resolve. I mean, just read the email.
I figured there was a little more to the story. Sometimes, the recounting of an event differs from the reality of that event.
The article provided the most sympathetic possible coverage of the story. And it still could not explain why Stanford sat on it for two months. It's not the FedSoc fault that they requested Stanford to abide by the rules Stanford set up.
” 3 conservative Stanford students tried to stop a classmate from graduating because he made a parody flyer about the Federalist Society.:
Did it meet the “parody” definition of Flynt v. Falwell — that it could not have been reasonably considered believable. I argue that it did not for three reasons:
1: At the time, it was widely believed that *all* conservative organizations had been involved in organizing the original Jan 6th frat party — and paranoia does not negate believably.
2: At the time, it was widely feared that there would be a repeat on the following January 6th — memory is that fencing was re-erected and security plans implemented (that ought to have been implemented the first time).
3: There was mention of “Riot Instructions To Follow.” That’s where they crossed the line and *I* would have forwarded the email to either the dean or campus security with the request that they “check it out”, i.e. “are those nuts really going to do this?”.
If the CHPD or FBI or USSS were to get a copy, what do you think they would do? Damn right — no one’s going to lose a badge over ignoring this, not after the last time — and pro-forma investigations like this usually are conducted by junior officers who tend to be both a bit overly enthusiastic and somewhat lacking in discretion.
Above and beyond the fact that Jan 6th did not make conservatives look good, we really don’t approve of this sort of stuff in the first place. Hence it is entirely possible that the FBI, or CHPD, or USSS, or CHiP was sent a copy by a horrified conservative who thought that the Stanford FedSoc had actually tried to do this.
” They filed a false and bad faith disciplinary case with the school months after the fact to cause maximum damage to a fellow student.”
1: It is not false if it happened, nor is it bad faith if it meets the criteria of the disciplinary code. It’s Stanford’s issue for having a morally reprehensible code, but private institutions often do.
It’s not bad faith to report a lawyer for having sex with a client, if the lawyer actually is — and here there was no denying that the email existed and who had sent it.
2: You presume that the complaint was filed in March for malicious reasons — yet present no evidence to support that allegation. I suggest that there is an equally likely other possibility — it took two months for this to work its way off campus and then back to the horrified FedSoc kids who then realized that it wasn’t parody if people were believing it to be true.
3: Let me present a possible hypothetical for this: the complaint was filed at the “request” of law enforcement (eg. FBI or USSS) who then “requested” the dean to do/say nothing about it while they investigated. This would fit the timeline perfectly.
A similar incident that was discussed at a conference a few decades back — the Clinton administration had email addresses for everyone including Sox, their pet cat. And yes, the USSS reads those emails.
Well, one day the system administrator got a visit from a USSS guy who said “we don’t think this really is a threat but we gotta check it out — Sox the Cat had gotten a death threat. They trace it to an employee had connected to the university system from home via dial-in modem (remember those?) and it turns out that her 5 year old daughter had watched her log in and proceeded to do it herself.
She sent the kind of email that a bright 5-year-old would send — from memory it was something like:
“Hi, my name is Suzie and I’m 5 years old. How old are you?
I hope you are a dog because I love dogs, if you are a cat, I will have to kill you.”
If they are going to check out something like this, and I understand why they have to, they aren’t going to check out a planned riot?
The kid who sent that purported parody should lose his bar card for real life stupidity…
You are incredibly fucking stupid
You are incredibly fucking stupid
Is that the mantra you repeat to yourself in the mirror every morning?
The result for Stanford should be no federal clerk-ships with an open letter explaining why such a decision was made. Scotusblog can publish it and pin it to the top on their website for a couple years. They can cc: David Lat.
Dear Sanford Students:
Your Dean and Administrators have done a great disservice to you in not teaching you.......(well, actually by not teaching you f'in anything at all).
Therefore, no clerkship applications will be accepted from Stanford students for the next ten years by any Court in this nation. You should feel honored by joining Yale in this distinction. Try Cuba or maybe North Korea. We understand they are short on attorneys as they seem to cycle through them pretty fast. After ten years we will review our decision.
Etc, Etc.
Sincerely,
SCOTUS
Federal Court Judges of all Districts and Circuits.
Superior Court of Podunk County
Probate Court of Middle of No-Where
PS Sanford Dean: (It appears your students' options are now very limited--choose wisely).
They'd never put that in writing, but I think Stanford just joined the list...
Right-wing judges tend to hire superstitious and bigoted Federalist Society members, not liberal-libertarian mainstreamers. If anyone were to be hurt by a judicial wingnut boycott of Stanford students, it would be the right-wing tokens Stanford admits as part of a perverse diversity push.
If that made Stanford less attractive to conservative students, maybe it would be for the best. Regent, Liberty, and Ave Maria could take the clingers, strengthening the example of the type of campus conservatives operate and prefer, and Stanford could rid itself of some intolerance and gullibility.
Yeah, that's how you keep the little people in line!
Murder is pretty easy to justify with the sort of overheated rhetoric they’re using. If he’s truly killing LGBT people with his judgments, wouldn’t a political assassination save lives?
The scary part of it is assassinating a circuit judge to force Biden into a progressive replacement just might work. There's always enough crazy people in a country of 300 million to take a go at it.
At the rate of things, this might not be hypothetical for much longer.
Would a Soros prosecutor even bring charges?
You sound like you have given up.
Understandable for a conservative at this stage of the culture war.
Acknowledging the possible outcomes of when evil Marxist Democrat tyrants control many of our federal institutions isn't "giving up"; it's just speaking the truth out loud.
Kirkland, during Reconstruction, Nathan Bedford Forrest gave up.
How'd that turn out?
Those who fail to learn from the mistakes of history get to relive them...
His moral descendants gave us the current Republican Party, the MAGA movement, the Federalist Society, this Teneo project, the Heritage Foundation, the religious right, and movement conservatism.
"Murder is pretty easy to justify with the sort of overheated rhetoric they’re using. If he’s truly killing LGBT people with his judgments, wouldn’t a political assassination save lives?"
I have no doubt that the Stanford students would have murdered him if they thought they could get away with it. Scary...
Law students! Scary indeed.
‘This thing I just made up completely is SO scary.’ Seriously, the actual act of disrupting a speech is just a kerfuffle. You have to BUILD IT UP to something ominous and dangerous to be scary.
You tend to loose hand-eye coordination under extreme stress, and I managed to mis-dial 911. My second call was to the operator (just one button) and her immediate response was "I am connecting you to the police" -- I guess the loud chants of "we're going to kill you" pretty much clarified the situation for her.
I'm told that I was requesting the National Guard -- I don't remember that, but I was quoted my sentence structure and I have no doubt that I have no doubt I said it.
Nige, until you have been in a situation like that, don't tell me that these are just young people singing Kumbaya a wee bit too loud. They wanted to see us dead, they weren't going to be the first person to cross the line into felonious assault, but they'd sure help the person who did.
And it helped me understand their paranoid fear of conservatives -- they think that we are like they are. That's we'd kill them if we could, and we wouldn't.
I'm sorry, are you talking about the same incident or something else?
Something else...
Sounds like you're reacting to raised voices with a touch of PTSD. Sympathies.
Dr. Ed's stories are getting more and more melodramatic.
> Murder is pretty easy to justify with the sort of overheated rhetoric they’re using. If he’s truly killing LGBT people with his judgments, wouldn’t a political assassination save lives?
Hence my prediction of the small scale "civil war" we might get in a few years.
Leftists will engage in "election by assassination", murdering any politician deemed a threat to "the right side of history"
Right-wingers will engage in blowing up buildings (à la Oklahoma) as they feel their enemy is the Deep State. I also suspect some of these will be false flag operations.
I predict the end result is more totalitarianism, less freedom, and more surveillance.
How distinctive is hosting a federal appellate judge among above average or even average law schools? I would have guessed any top 100 school welcomes circuit court judges (and district court judges, and state court judges) somewhat regularly.
Kirkland, this was an opportunity for them to tell *this* judge why his opinions and rulings were wrong -- one of the few venues where he'd have to sit there and listen to them -- and not just find them in contempt.
Assuming that there was a scintilla of merit in their arguments, and I'm not sure there is, they wasted an opportunity that they won't get again. To accomplish what -- reinforce his prejudices?
(You do know what Edmund Burke said about prejudices, don't you?)
"Whether or not you agree with the rulings of the very conservative Fifth Circuit—and, for the record, I disagree with many of them—the opportunity to hear from a sitting federal appellate judge about his court's jurisprudence is why students go to places like SLS"
Well this is a pile of horse shit and enough to convince me not to read the article linked to.
Anyone who thinks law students go to SLS (or almost any other law school) 'to hear from a sitting federal appellate judge' is dreaming. There are multiple reasons peeps go to law school but this is not one of them.
It's more of a side dish than the main meal.
I beg to differ. I know several law students. The law school they attend was a big draw BECAUSE it had several alum that were federal court judges who came to speak frequently to law students. The students were eloquent on that subject and could not wait for the next ______ lecture or _____seminar class so they could have an opportunity to listen to the judges and get their insights, or attend the classes taught by the judges. Yes. Federal judge speeches or classes are a big plus for law schools.
The panel the school had with women judges and how they juggled home life and their careers as judges was well attended by both female and men students and there was so many wanting to attend, a separate room had to be set up for the overflow with a large screen streaming the panel session.
The Fifth Circuit currently sports graduates of Baylor, Louisiana State (multiple), Alabama, Tulane (multiple), Mississippi (multiple), Syracuse, Loyola New Orleans, and similar schools. I sense nearly all above average (and most average) law schools have alumni on the federal bench, likely including the appellate bench. A visit from a federal judge (or even a federal appellate judge) does not seem much of a distinguishing characteristic.
Kirkland -- so much for the conservative law schools not producing judges -- and who says a future President won't select from this circuit for SCOTUS appointments?
I do not know whether they are conservative schools, nor do I much care (except to hope that fervent conservatives do not control them, for that is the certain path to fourth-tier shittiness). It is irrelevant to the point being addressed. They are average to above average schools. They likely feature regular visits from federal judges. The Lat observation that 'people go to Stanford to benefit from the rarified opportunity to be in a room with some bigoted, stale-thinking federal judge from the deep south' seems daft. That roster of schools supports that proposition.
Not long before he passed away, Justice Scalia gave a talk at my school. I only got to attend it because I was an alumnus.
I wonder if, today, his talk would be similarly disrupted by "woke" protesters. Probably so.
Obviously so.
No, because -- I was told -- SCOTUS justices come with their own (SCOTUS) security, which is supplemented by the US Marshals Office when necessary.
I looked into this when I was considering trying to bring Clarence Thomas to UMass Amherst -- in part because we wouldn't have to pay a 5-figure security bill.
Scalia, being Scalia, may have said "I don't need that foolishness" but I'm inclined to think otherwise. And like all bullies, these leftists are inherent cowards. After the first half dozen got dropped, cuffed, and removed, the rest would all lose their nerve.
Curious to know what it was about this judge that stirred so much outrage, I did the Google thing. Well, it took me no more than a couple of minutes get a sense of him and conclude that his views were indeed loathsome. What I don't understand, however, is what those who find him fundamentally objectionable think they accomplish by preventing him from being heard? And why is the school so inept in managing these manageable enough occasions?
Can't Stanford provide a room for the judge to speak in which all will have pledged in advance of entry not to be disruptive, with it understood that they will be subject to discipline if they violate that pledge? (The event will be videotaped so if necessary the tape will be there for later review by a disciplinary panel.) At the same time, those who cannot abide such limits on their free (and vocal) expression, can view the judge's presentation live by video from another room, where they can object aloud.
Whose rights would be abridged by such an arrangement? (The objectors would be free to march, picket, leaflet, chant, or otherwise make themselves and their views known outside the venue.)
What's wrong with what I propose?
The ultimate irony here is that a judge -- who should have to justify his decisions -- winds up becoming the victim. It re-enforces in his own mind the legitimacy of his decisions and pushes him even further.
That one she/he/it has reinforced every prejudice he ever had about the LBGTQ community -- what are the consequences of *that*?
If the judge is prejudiced, the protester is right. Prejudices are self-reinforcing.
Bullshyte.
The 19th Amendment passed because *MEN* thought that women deserved the right to vote.
Jim Crow ended because *White* people came to realize that it was wrong.
And the Eugenics Movement ended with the horrors of the Holocaust.
What you fail to understand is that prejudices also end...
It took that long to pass because men wouldn't allow it but women went to extremes to bring it about.
Jim Crow existed because white people wanted it to but black people went to extremes to end it.
Men and white people didn't just suddenly decide out of the goodness of their hearts, they were the people who always had the power to do it, they had to be pushed and shamed and persuaded to do it by the actions of people who had none.
I'm not sure how your third example pertains. You're hardly praising the Nazis for bringing about the end of eugenics.
So an LGTBQ person doesn't have to be deferential to a homophobic judge because you, a straight person, are made uncomfortable.
Deferential and civil are not the same things -- something the left usually forgets.
For the lack of anything else -- and we are talking about wanna-be lawyers here -- I think that one could civilly ask "why shouldn't you be impeached?" -- or "why shouldn't you be disbarred for bar reg whatever?" That DEFINITELY is not being deferential to him!!!
And these are wannabe lawyers -- they can't think of specific issues with specific decisions he has made?
I find that quite scary -- not that they hold the views they do, but they don't know enough about those views to be able to support them.
Engaging with him might have afforded him more respect than they felt he was due. You have to dig deep to find this scary, and end up with fears so abstract and diffuse they barely make sense. 'They need to study more,' basically?
That is true. But not while judges such as Kyle Duncan are on the bench.
No problem replacement won't solve, thank goodness.
The people operating strong, liberal-libertarian mainstream schools should have no interest in tips from conservatives concerning the operation of any educational institution. None.
No more than the Captain of the Titanic was interested in warnings he should slow the ship down because of reported icebergs ahead.
The law schools are going to self-destruct in the next decade.
I'm not clear. You see what I propose as a "tip() from a conservative"? How is it other than "neutral," workable, and reasonable? Is Stanford "libertarian" in inclination?
I'd really like to know your objection to the proposal?
The best course would have been for Stanford to refrain from hosting an objectionable bigot who is an affront to Stanford's values.
And better schools should not be in the market -- as a general point -- for pointers from conservatives on anything related to education. Conservatives have screwed up enough schools with their ideas.
This is what happens when your admissions are only 22% White and the other 78% woke morons.
Or, it could just be another paid astroturf with bussed in morons like most of these things turn out to be.
Paid by the Democrats at the State Department and their Jew master Soros.
Soros does not represent all Jews.
Dr. Ed 2, congratulations, you seem to be somewhat less of an ignorant bigot than BravoCharlieDelta.
Call the ADL and the Cancel Squad! Someone pointed out that Soros is a Jew and works hand in glove with the Democrats at the State Department! It's like the Shoah all over again!
Neurodoc, I also don't think that the Clintons represent all Methodists. In fact, I know some Methodists who despise both of them, and I gotta think there are Jews who despise Soros.
As a Congregationalist, I'm damn sure that the Obamas don't represent me!!!!!!!!!
Dr. Ed, your musings about Soros, who is as unrelated as can be to this thread, may be less moronic and bigoted than BravoCharlieDelta's, but that isn't to say they aren't still moronic and bigoted. Or can you say how Soros and or Jews pertain here?
Dr. Ed: Someone asserts the Jewish Americans hated JFK, arranged his assassination, and after the fact sent their fellow Jew Jack Ruby to shoot Oswald and help cover everything up. You jump in to rebut that, saying many Jewish Americans were great fans of JFK. No question that the person claiming Jews were behind JFK's assassination is a true antisemite, but your strange "rebuttal" of that claim ("Soros does not represent all Jews.") casts suspicion on you too. [Look up "negative pregnant".]
Soros does not practice Judaism or identify as a Jew in any way, but antisemites and right-wingers (is there a difference) routinely name check him for their bigoted purposes. I don't know how the Clintons and Methodism/Methodists are in any way analogous to Soros and Judaism/Jews, but you seem to think there might be a useful analogy or contrast there. (When/where have the Clintons been personally attacked on account of their Methodist faith? And who, other than you, do you imagine gives a sh*t that you hate the Clintons?)
Yeah, it's nice of you to notice that the raging anti-semite and racist is offended by this while still helping him out by inflating this into something HUGE AND SCARY.
This commenter is fortunate that the Volokh Conspiracy tends not to get riled by antisemitism that can't be pinned on the liberal-libertarian mainstream.
Carry on, clingers.
Professor Volokh, thank you for linking to Lat's article. It was a lengthy, and great read. Also, I want to thank you for consistently bringing forward posts on free speech issues. We very much need them.
VC Conspirators, not that there is a trend.....but:
At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, MIT, and now Stanford; free speech is under attack, and viewpoint suppression has taken hold at our elite schools. Supposedly, these children are our future leaders. You might want to think about how these budding totalitarian crybullies at our elite schools are going to behave in 10 years or so.
Were I a Stanford alum, I would think long and hard about donating to the school. Do you really want to be associated with these SLS pupils (I cannot call them students, they are spoiled brats)? Stanford has a long, and proud heritage; they are squandering it away. The SLS that Sandra Day O'Connor attended is gone.
If SLS were merely guilty of being an ungracious host, ok that happens. That is not what happened here. The guest was a sitting US Circuit Court judge, not just some 'Lawyer Joe Blow'. It is abundantly clear from the video (linked in Lat's article) and the transcript of remarks (also linked) that this was staged, and planned in advance. The administration and quite honestly, the Board of Trustees of Stanford should be shocked and ashamed at this display.
One other note: A poster upthread made a very good point. The incendiary language used today will motivate others to extreme actions, like murder and assassination. That is where this is heading. Make no mistake about it.
"You might want to think about how these budding totalitarian crybullies at our elite schools are going to behave in 10 years or so."
I do. I keep my passport current.
I do. I keep my passport current.
LMAO. I hate to break it to you Brett, but you’re going to live a long happy and comfortable life here in the USA. Sucks to suck I guess.
What, in case your next talk at Stanford is disrupted by a bunch of kids?
Commenter_XY -- I would not at all be surprised to see that this was planned by people on the Stanford payroll -- faculty & administrators.
Law school may be different, but in general, students just aren't there long enough to pull something like this off. It requires networks that they haven't had time to build and institutional knowledge that they haven't had the time to acquire.
Take their law review -- they have a full time staff person managing it -- see https://law.stanford.edu/directory/meg-harrington/ even though law reviews are technically student run. I just picked the law review at random, it's true of all effective student organizations on that (or any other) campus -- you gotta have someone who's been there for a few years.
Now I am *not* saying that Meg Harrington organized this -- I have no idea who she is beyond the primary contact person for the law journal. My point is that someone (often plural) in positions such as hers inevitably organize all purported "student" protests.
Not at all surprising that our local leftist brigade racially defends disruptive protests on the grounds of hurt feelings. See also https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11845725/Media-mogul-Steve-Forbes-assaulted-BLM-protesters-Conservative-book-launch.html
I suppose we should be glad they are not following advice from “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and murdering people over political disagreements.
Speaking as an outsider, it does, indeed, look like the school administration set the speaker up. Can someone name a single action the administration did to preserve order, and, having failed in that, to restore order once matters got out of hand as they so obviously would?
I don’t think it is quite sinking in how corrosive it is to see law students carrying on like members of the Youth Brigade, with their mentors and guides waving the flags behind them, goading them with “prepared remarks”. Law schools, you are destroying your own reputation, hand over fist. Sadly, your reputation is your only currency. When you see your institution whither away before your very eyes, at least you will know who is to blame. Small comfort.
Don't worry too much. For most of them it's their last opportunity to experience childhood. The real world is not a safe space, and even with their ueber-elite degrees to protect them, they will most likely sink once immersed in it--or, as most do who do not go into government or academia, learn to swim.
https://reason.com/volokh/2020/10/07/why-a-broad-view-of-academic-freedom-is-essential/?comments=true#comment-8506704
Your comment was remarkably prescient.
As law students, seriously asking him to explain himself and his decisions would be more effective than disrupting the speech.
Better optics too.
But it wouldn't have empowered the student affairs folk who were likely behind this. Ability to control the mobs is serious currency in academia....
At Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Cornell, Northwestern, MIT, and now Stanford; free speech is under attack, and viewpoint suppression has taken hold at our elite schools.
The right keeps yelling this is true. And they've been fed the anecdotes to believe it. I'm sure there are issues with shunning about politics between the students, just as there always have been. But an attack is just more persecution narrativism.
Here, and across the right, this consistent insistence of a widespread *war* on conservativism is becoming a broad hostility to higher education, and indeed an anti-intellectual push generally.
Often from those who have had a lot of education themselves, but are convinced that it's different now.
That's not a sustainable place. The right is losing college educated demographics, as those who recently were in school realize how much bullshit there is coming from the right. non-college white males will remain, but college educated white guys in the suburbs and rural areas are not going to stick around.
Except for divorced white guys. That is, after all, the demographic that is closest identified with Trump voting.
That's a lot of projection. The left fears and opposes intellectual engagement, which is why they do this kind of thing. The right is opposed to pretending that kind of thing is intellectual, yes, which is why you claim the right is making "anti-intellectual push", but it's really a push to defend intellect against bullying and censorship and demands for conformity. See also COVID-19 science.
Sure, dude, if you get to define what is intellectual and define school as not being that, then the left sure is anti-intellectual.
See also COVID-19 science. You’re rather proving my point about anti-intellectualism. I'm sure you went to enough schooling to understand how science works. But you've managed to partisanize yourself into forgetting what you learned.
What part of the official stance on COVID-19 ended up being accurate? Everything had plenty of censoring of all alternative views.
In the Sweet case, Clarence Darrow commented that there were enough witnesses who denied there was a mob...to make a mob.
There are enough incidents where someone comments that "this particular incident doesn't make a trend"...to make a trend.
No, that's not how this works. How many schools are there? How much conservative faculty? How many young conservative clubs at schools?
There's a reason why, for all the protestation this is a national crisis there hasn't been any kind of statistics about it. Closest you get is people saying they can't always speak their mind. Which I think is something to address, but also has been true in almost any institution since the city of Ur.
I don’t know about “the right,” since I’m not receiving their memos telling me what to say.
Forget whether open and “out” conservatives among the students and faculty are being mistreated.
Focus instead on the regular students, who are being taught that it’s acceptable and effective to shut down school events because of disagreement with the school’s approach to intellectual diversity. All in the name of suppressing opposition to a particular set of (highly dubious) beliefs.
The targets here aren’t right-wingers but the soft centrists, letting them know where the real power is so they won’t risk themselves to oppose the establishment consensus which the Red Guards are promoting.
“Closest you get is people saying they can’t always speak their mind.”
Yes, that’s quite related to the point I just made.
regular students, who are being taught that it’s acceptable and effective to shut down school events
See? This is utterly unsupported. There is a reason when this kind of nonsense happens it makes the news - it is not super common, ad it's not something' regular students' are being taught. But it won't stop you from saying it like it is absolutely established.
There are no targets, and there is no red guard. Take your drama pants off.
If you believed in the concept of a chilling effect, you'd realize why colleges don't have to be the All Censorship, All the Time channel.
There is no chilling effect established based on these anecdotes. You don't get to just say 'chilling effect' and bootstrap your way into being persecuted.
And you don't get to escape mockery for covering your eyes and your ears to all the cases like this speech getting shut down by reactionary morons resorting to force and coopting officials who damn well should know better. No matter how many times you post the Big Lie, leftists still regularly act to censor speech they disagree with and to blacklist those speakers.
You confuse the general with the specific. There are plenty of cases of DEI offices being shitty. That doesn't establish anything like the fact that they are all shitty.
Keep ranting about what leftists do, though. Truly making out a serious person.
"There are plenty of cases of DEI offices being shitty."
So it's gone from single anecdotes to "plenty." That's good enough for me.
"That doesn’t establish anything like the fact that they are all shitty."
Fortunately, I didn't make such an absolute claim. Just plenty of them.
it’s gone from single anecdotes to “plenty.”
These are the same thing. Plenty is still single anecdotes. Not data.
You claim a chilling effect. Is your scope...like one school? You continue to just smug about without a strong claim.
How difficult is it to search this very site?
"40 Percent of Liberal Professors Are Afraid They'll Lose Their Jobs Over a Misunderstanding
"A new survey from FIRE reveals rampant illiberalism and self-censorship among young faculty."
That's the predictable result of what you admit are "plenty" of instances.
https://reason.com/2023/02/28/40-percent-of-liberal-professors-are-afraid-theyll-lose-their-jobs-over-a-misunderstanding/
I'd like to see that compared to how many actually do lose their jobs because of misunderstandings, along with the source of the pressure for the firings. It isn't as if there isn't a lot of fearmongering about it from the right, who also try to get professors fired over things that could be misunderstandings.
I guess these liberal professors are watching too mich Fox News, reading too much Breitbart, etc. Scares them silly, poor dears.
Who would want to have either of those single them out for their little mobs of 'free speech absolutists?'
Like I comment below, we're going way beyond free speech here into the duties of hospitality to invited guests. They could have a policy not to invite certain speakers, but if they invite someone, it's wrong to, e. g., serve them bad food, or insult or ambush them, or allow others to do so.
Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.
Those 40% of liberal professors don't sound that comfortable.
But, then, it's their fault for obsessively following Townhall.com. /sarc
Or Townhall is obsessively following them.
"I’d like to see that compared to how many actually do lose their jobs because of misunderstandings,"
How many women afraid of walking down dark alleys at night actually get raped?
Statistically, not many -- but does that justify ignoring their fears?
Based on the folks in this thread, abolish dark alleys, or men, I guess.
But the fact is we DO compile figures on sexual assaults against women? And those figures serve a useful purpose both in terms of law enforcement and activism? So... is there a reason you DON'T want to see such figures? Or those figures are known, just never brought up in these dicussions? Such as that post here on this ssue a few weeks ago that showed most white academics suffered few long-term career-damaging consequences from such incidents, but black academics were MORE likely to suffer consequences and damage to their career, and those incidents were usually brought about by right-wing media like Breitbart.
Don't believe your lyin' eyes, Sarcastr0? That is your rejoinder? Weak.
Bring back the old Sarcastr0.
I've been saying for about a decade that the plural of anecdote is not data. This isn't new.
If you think it is, examine whether maybe your standards have shifted.
"I’ve been saying for about a decade that the plural of anecdote is not data."
A decade of you saying of each new event, "this is an isolated incident"?
Except that the plural of anecdote is indeed data. The question is how many anecdotes does it take to get the center of a Tootsie Pop. One? Two? Thhrreee.
Ok, now that was one of your better lines (the plural of anecdote is not data). I'll give you that one.
Still though, it is happening in our elite schools Sarcastr0. Plenty of blog posts here on the suppression of free speech. When the shoe is on the other foot, will you still be so sanguine? Will it just be a series of unconnected anecdotes that don't add up to data? I think not.
Open your eyes, Sarcastr0. This leads to a bad outcome for us all.
An old old line and not one of my making.
I'm not defending any of these anecdotes. I have no problem with policy changes to prevent them. I'm pushing back against those who claim this is the norm, there is a huuuge crisis, and we need to start firing everyone and shutting down schools. That is becoming the consensus around here, and as I said that is sufficiently divorced from evident reality it is electorally unsustainable.
This is the same nonsense as the right wing fear of cities as crime ridden wastelands. Or some on the left that think the South is nothing but unreconstructed racists and Deliverance pastiche. You've got a distorted lens and you're taking it too far.
When the shoe is on the other foot, will you still be so sanguine? Will it just be a series of unconnected anecdotes that don’t add up to data? I think not.
Counterfactual hypocricy is not much of an argument. Maybe I'll stick to my standards, maybe I won't. But if I did give into my partisan impulses, that makes that version of me wrong; it doesn't touch this argument.
OT: I read Youngstown. Wordy. But I did read it. 🙂
The older an opinion gets, the more stilted it gets. I should have told you to just read the concurrence; that's all anyone uses these days.
Read the wiki on it as well - the story around it is also some good history.
“I’m pushing back against those who claim this is the norm, there is a huuuge crisis, and we need to start firing everyone and shutting down schools.”
I’ll happily push back against that, too.
I just think there are, as one commenter puts it, plenty of cases of DEI offices acting shitty. But so far the stories released to the public have mainly been about the elite law schools, not the lower-tier ones. So there’s no cause for concern.
You can pick one aspect of a broad problem and say it’s not a huge crisis. It’s just a couple law schools (Yale and Stanford). It’s just a couple prominent people like J. K. Rowling and Steven Pinker. It’s just a little editing of the Internet at the urging of the government. Take each of these things by themselves and minimize them, ignoring the broader context, and it all looks so innocuous, doesn’t it?
You're not defending any of the anecdotes, you just reject them out of hand, along with survey data and left-wing cities' crime responses and ideas like "Lori Lightfoot lost re-election because of how she leads" in favor of "right wing fear of cities as crime ridden wastelands".
The old you would have known better.
"If you're not rejecting these anecdotes, why do I keep insisting that you are"
Crime responses is quite far afield - quit galloping and stay on topic.
As I said, you keep ignoring things that are inconvenient for your blinkered perspective -- like the survey data I linked to. You pretend that no number of rule-violating distortions are evidence, that data isn't data, that you don't criticize slightly less left-wing leaders like Eric Adams when their positions diverge from far-leftists like Lori Lightfoot. Like a lot of assholes, you define all the inconvenient facts as irrelevant to your point. Why do you keep acting like an asshole?
Plenty of ways to get data. Anecdotes aren’t one of them.
Nice above talks about rape statistics. This isn’t that. You feel like it is, but that doesn’t make it so. It just makes you mad at me for having standards.
Except for divorced white guys. That is, after all, the demographic that is closest identified with Trump voting.
I remember the first time I encountered that insight in some polling analysis. This seems to extend beyond Trump support, reaching Republican voting in general. It might be difficult to find a more disaffected, doomed bunch in modern America.
I, too, will never hire a Stanford grad as a clerk. Also, I will obey the law that forbids sleeping under a bridge, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.
The utter quivering terror on display here over a bunch of kids who will either be absorbed by the system or ground down by it as they try to go against it is purely performative. All the invocations of fascism, forgetting Umberto Eco's observation of how fascism invokes an enemy-on-the-inside who is at once all-powerful and pathetically weak. Y'know, like a bunch of law students.
"utter quivering terror"
Nah.
"a bunch of kids who will either be absorbed by the system or ground down"
They didn't seem particularly ground down when the administration enabled their behavior.
'Blithering panic,' then? I mean, it's fake, obviously.
The administration giveth and the administration taketh away.
Blessed be the name of the administrators?
No-one is ever likely to bless the administrators.
These whining right-wingers enjoy focusing on Stanford's ostensibly insufficient hospitability toward conservative bigots; it enables them to ignore for a bit the point that conservatives turn just about every campus they get their hands on into low-quality hayseed farms known for
imposing old-timey speech and conduct codes;
engaging in strenuous discrimination with respect to hiring, admissions, firings, and discipline;
collecting loyalty oaths;
suppressing science to flatter superstition;
warping history for congruence with silly dogma;
requiring statements of faith;
embracing bigotry;
vividly flouting academic freedom;
and teaching absolute nonsense.
That anyone would figure the liberal-libertarian mainstream -- operator of America's strongest research and teaching institutions -- should be in the market for pointers from conservatives on how to run an educational institution is silly.
Always a bootlicker for the powerful and well-connected, eh?
Like a federal judge?
You might be missing the point – if they’d do this to a federal judge, with U. S. Marshals present, what will they do to someone more humble and vulnerable?
You can say that about any protest. Oh sure, they're protesting a monstrous dictator, but if they'll do that to a monstrous dictator what will the do to a more humble and vulnerable dictator?
Besides, isn't the whole point what federal judges can do to the humble and vulnerable?
No, because these attacks aren’t confined to federal judges.
If they can get away with attacking a judge, or Steven Pinker, or Rowling, they can get away with it with Joe and Josephine Six-Pack, too.
Seems like they've been managing to confine it to rich establishment assholes so far.
Like that 40% of liberal faculty members?
I'm sure Breitbart will take up the slack.
The STUDENTS are rich establishment assholes. As are the faculty.
And then when Joe Sixpack pulls out his sixshooter to defend his bride, everyone will freak out.
The only issue I would have, though, is his marksmanship -- the one thing that those on our side often neglect to mention is hitting innocent bystanders. That's not cool....
WERE there Federal Marshals present? That makes this even more interesting -- why didn't they intervene?
Intervene to protect him from raised voices?
We're not just dealing with academic freedom here; we're dealing with a principle much older than that, dating to the days before academies, even before literacy.
The laws of hospitality mean if you invite a guest to your place, you're supposed to respect that guest, including protecting him from insult. If you don't want him as a guest, don't invite him, but having invited him, don't ambush him with attacks or allow him to be ambushed.
You think the people protesting were the Federalists who invited him? Disturbing, if true.
The University invited him. It could have declined to do so, which would have been much better than the de facto ambush it actually pulled off.
But the students who protested presumably didn't. Or hell, maybe the people who did invite him wanted a great big shouting match and everyone got what they wanted.
Despite his protestations, he really wanted it!
Sure, why not?
If we're considering hypothetical situations, let's entertain the hypothesis that the audience wasn't in on the joke. Maybe they thought there were there to hear a speech.
Bullshit. Duncan is a walking. drawling affront to Stanford's values. The fledgling bigots and disaffected misfits of the Stanford Federalist Society chapter invited the dogshit speaker from Louisiana.
Short answer: You’re an imbecile.
Longer answer: The Dean cited University policy and classified the meeting as a “public event,” which is a subcategory of “a University function or approved activity.”
https://studentservices.stanford.edu/more-resources/student-policies/student-rights-responsibilities/campus-disruptions
So it’s either a “University funciton,” or at minimum the University “approved” the event. Either way, they took on the responsibility of host for an approved guest on their property.
Did it ever occur to you, Kirkland, that exposing students to judges with whom they might viscerally disagree is an important part of a legal education?
Or, when in practice and having to appear before such a judge, are they supposed to simply melt down and abandon their clients?
There are judges with varying viewpoints who are not lifelong, reprehensible bigots.
Why invite this jerk? Why not draw names from a hat rather than indulge the campus gay-bashers, racist vote suppressors, and un-American immigrant-haters who invited this loser?
I know the bigots attracted to this blog from the right-wing fringe are unlikely to understand this, but most Americans -- especially at strong educational institutions -- find bigots and bigotry objectionable.
Maybe exposing judges to people who viscerally disagree with them is part of the judge's education.
Who cares whether, in a cosmic sense, the judge deserved it. Did the public deserve it? Did the University deserve it? Did the audience who believed in good faith that they were going to hear a speech, deserve it?
They could have educated him by prohibiting him from coming on campus to speak. Then nobody would have wasted their time coming to what they thought would be a speech, they could have spent that time studying or whatever else they do when out of class.
You’re weird as fuck, dude.
Guests in your house are not protected from insult based on some deep primal law; not a thing. Like not a thing since the Enlightenment. Certainly not in the modern era.
Heckler’s veto sucks, but it isn’t violating the Iron Laws of Anthropology.
You’re cargo culting intellectual concepts, and doing it all wrong.
Remind me not to accept your dinner invitations.
I’m no fan of that which is misleadingly called the “Enlightenment,” but even I hadn’t thought to allege that their principles included rejecting the laws of hospitality.
If you’re looking for weird cargo cultists, look no further than those who think that by associating your bad activities with a big university, you can make those activities respectable.
Like the Federalist Society.
If the university is embarrased by the Federalist Society, they can shut it down, or at least not let them bring speakers to campus.
Read the Koran -- guests are to be protected.
Why should I care about what the Koran says on this? Sodom and Gomorrah is also about the law of hospitality.
Doesn't say anything about guests not being insulted, nor does it apply in the modern more urban area. So it's irrelevant, and inapplicable.
Sodom and Gomorrah were urban.
Ancient cities are not the same urbanization as modern cities. Though you seem more into jargon than content so dunno if you knew that.
Then go read Stanford’s rules about behavior that they expect from their students, staff and visitors. Go read the apology letter that explains why these students and this administrator were way beyond the pale.
It’s sadly unironic, and in fact what we have become used to from you, that you accuse people of being “weird as fuck” while insisting that you’re not defending behavior while you rabidly criticize every single criticism that other people make of that behavior.
I mean the criticism has devolved into trying to elevate it to a laws-of-hospitality-breaking massacre on the scale of the Red Wedding.
No.
I’m not defending anything, jut noting the intelectualist melodrama has gotten incredible,