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These days, questioning the efficacy of a vaccine is a nihilistic, anti-scientific assault on society itself. And yet refusing to define the meaning of “woman” — a question a peasant in the medieval world could have correctly, and straightforwardly, answered — is treated as a completely normal moment by the press. Ketanji Brown Jackson says she “not a biologist,” admitting that the definition of “woman” is physiological and not psychological, to avoid offending progressives. She, of course, knows well what a woman is. The fact that such a silly question can’t be directly answered reflects the insanity of the political moment. There is a chasm between arguing that a “society should make accommodations for transgender Americans” and “men can get pregnant,” and yet Democrats are now going with the latter.
Jackson’s answer is also a reminder that the liberals’ rock-ribbed belief in “science” often relies on reverse-engineered junk science concocted to prop up trendy new theories. Liberals are no more interested in science than anyone else. Scaremongering over GMOs, which are not only completely harmless but a lifesaving technological advancement, is anti-science. Opposing fracking, which is as safe as any other means of extracting fossil fuels, is anti-science. Please tell me more about your homeopathic organic cures, enlightened Democrat. However inconvenient it is for proponents of abortion, denying that life begins at conception — “I have a religious view that I set aside when ruling on cases,” went Jackson’s crafty answer — is also anti-science. As is the notion that a person’s perspective can determine whether something is alive or their gender. And you don’t have to be a biologist to understand why.
In 2017, the super lawyer David Boies was at a corporate retreat at the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, Florida, hosted by his law firm, Boies, Schiller and Flexner. Boies was a liberal legend: He had represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore, and, in 2013, successfully defended gay marriage in California, in Hollingsworth v. Perry, paving the way for the landmark Supreme Court ruling two years later.
On the last day of the retreat, Boies gave a talk in the hotel ballroom to 100 or so attorneys, according to a lawyer who was present at the event. Afterwards, Boies’s colleagues were invited to ask questions.
Most of the questions were yawners. Then, an associate in her late twenties stood up. She said there were lawyers at the firm who were “uncomfortable” with Boies representing disgraced movie maker Harvey Weinstein, and she wanted to know whether Boies would pay them severance so they could quit and focus on applying for jobs at other firms. Boies, who declined to comment for this article, said no.
That lawyers could be tainted by representing unpopular clients was hardly news. But in times past, lawyers worried about the public—not other lawyers. Defending communists, terrorists, and cop killers had never been a crowd pleaser, but that’s what lawyers had to do sometimes: Defend people who were hated.
When congressional Republicans attacked attorneys for representing Guantanamo detainees, for example, the entire profession rallied around them. The American Civil Liberties Union noted that John Adams took pride in representing British soldiers accused of taking part in the Boston Massacre, calling it “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered to my country.”
But that’s not how the new associates saw Boies’s choice to represent Weinstein. They thought there were certain people you just did not represent—people so hateful and reprehensible that helping them made you complicit. The partners, the old-timers—pretty much everyone over 50—found this unbelievable. That wasn’t the law as they had known it. That wasn’t America.
“The idea that guilty people shouldn’t get lawyers attacks the legal system at its root,” Andrew Koppelman, a prominent liberal scholar of constitutional law at Northwestern University, said. “People will ask: ‘How can you represent someone who’s guilty?’ The answer is that a society where accused people don’t get a defense as a matter of course is a society you don’t want to live in. It’s a totalitarian nightmare.” ‘Operating in a Panopticon’
The adversarial legal system—in which both sides of a dispute are represented vigorously by attorneys with a vested interest in winning—is at the heart of the American constitutional order. Since time immemorial, law schools have tried to prepare their students to take part in that system.
Not so much anymore. Now, the politicization and tribalism of campus life have crowded out old-fashioned expectations about justice and neutrality. The imperatives of race, gender and identity are more important to more and more law students than due process, the presumption of innocence, and all the norms and values at the foundation of what we think of as the rule of law.
Critics of those values are nothing new, of course, and certainly they are not new at elite law schools. Critical race theory, as it came to be called in the 1980s, began as a critique of neutral principles of justice. The argument went like this: Since the United States was systemically racist—since racism was baked into the country’s political, legal, economic and cultural institutions—neutrality, the conviction that the system should not seek to benefit any one group, camouflaged and even compounded that racism. The only way to undo it was to abandon all pretense of neutrality and to be unneutral. It was to tip the scales in favor of those who never had a fair shake to start with.
But critical race theory, until quite recently, only had so much purchase in legal academia. The ideas of its founders—figures like Derrick Bell, Alan David Freeman, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—tended to have less influence on the law than on college students, who by 2015 seemed significantly less liberal (“small L”) than they used to be. There was the Yale Halloween costume kerfuffle. The University of Missouri president being forced out. Students at Evergreen State patrolling campus with baseball bats, eyes peeled for thought criminals.
At first, the conventional wisdom held that this was “just a few college kids”—a few spoiled snowflakes—who would “grow out of it” when they reached the real world and became serious people. That did not happen. Instead, the undergraduates clung to their ideas about justice and injustice. They became medical students and law students. Then 2020 happened.
All of sudden, critical race theory was more than mainstream in America’s law schools. It was mandatory.
Starting this Fall, Georgetown Law School will require all students to take a class “on the importance of questioning the law’s neutrality”and assessing its “differential effects on subordinated groups,” according to university documents obtained by Common Sense. UC Irvine School of Law, University of Southern California Gould School of Law, Yeshiva University’s Cardozo School of Law, and Boston College Law School have implemented similar requirements. Other law schools are considering them.
As of last month, the American Bar Association is requiring all accredited law schools to “provide education to law students on bias, cross-cultural competency, and racism,” both at the start of law school and “at least once again before graduation.” That’s in addition to a mandatory legal ethics class, which must now instruct students that they have a duty as lawyers to “eliminate racism.” (The American Bar Association, which accredits almost every law school in the United States, voted 348 to 17 to adopt the new standard.)
Trial verdicts that do not jibe with the new politics are seen as signs of an inextricable hate—and an illegitimate legal order. At the Santa Clara University School of Law, administrators emailed students that the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse—the 17-year-old who killed two men and wounded another during a riot, in Kenosha, Wisconsin—was “further evidence of the persistent racial injustice and systemic racism within our criminal justice system.” At UC Irvine, the university’s chief diversity officer emailed students that the acquittal “conveys a chilling message: Neither Black lives nor those of their allies’ matter.” (He later apologized for having “appeared to call into question a lawful trial verdict.”)
Professors say it is harder to lecture about cases in which accused rapists are acquitted, or a police officer is found not guilty of abusing his authority. One criminal law professor at a top law school told me he’s even stopped teaching theories of punishment because of how negatively students react to retributivism—the view that punishment is justified because criminals deserve to suffer.
“I got into this job because I liked to play devil’s advocate,” said the tenured professor, who identifies as a liberal. “I can’t do that anymore. I have a family.”
Other law professors—several of whom asked me not to identify their institution, their area of expertise, or even their state of residence—were similarly terrified.
Nadine Strossen, the first woman to head the American Civil Liberties Union and a professor at New York Law School, told me: “I massively self-censor. I assume that every single thing that is said, every facial gesture, is going to be recorded and potentially disseminated to the entire world. I feel as if I am operating in a panopticon.”
This has all come as a shock to many law professors, who had long assumed that law schools wouldn’t cave to the new orthodoxy.
At a Heterodox Academy panel discussion in December 2020, Harvard Law School Professor Randall Kennedy said that, until recently, he’d thought that fears of law schools becoming illiberal—shutting down unpopular views or voices—had been overblown. “I’ve changed my mind,” said Kennedy, who, in 2013, published a book called “For Discrimination: Race, Affirmative Action, and the Law.” “I think that there really is a big problem.”
The problem has come not just from students, but from administrators, who often foment the forces they capitulate to. Administrators now outnumber faculty at some universities—Yale employs 5,066 administrators and just 4,937 professors—and law schools haven’t been spared the bloat. Several law professors bemoaned the proliferation of diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which, they said, tend to validate student grievances and encourage censorship.
The distinction between DEI and the rest of the administration is often wafer thin. At Yale Law School, the Office of Student Affairs told students in an email last week that they could “swing by” the office to grab a “Critical Race Theory T-Shirt!” The T-shirt repeated the phrase “reparations & prison abolition” five times, Bart Simpson-style, before delivering the kicker: “critical race theory & yale law school.”
Law school deans have further entrenched this culture. In 2020, 176 of them petitioned the American Bar Association to require “education around bias, cultural competence, and anti-racism” at all accredited law schools, which led to the new ABA standards this February.
As the new ideology has been institutionalized, the costs of disobeying it have grown steeper, both for faculty and for students.
At the University of Illinois Chicago, for example, a law professor’s classes were cancelled and his career threatened for including a bleeped out “‘n____’” on an exam in a hypothetical scenario about employment discrimination. (He had used the same scenario for years without incident.)
A Harvard Law professor told me that students face “social death” if they buck the consensus. Students at other law schools—including Yale, NYU, Boston College, Georgetown, and Northwestern—told me much the same thing. “You want to have friends, so you don’t want to say anything controversial,” one Georgetown Law student explained.
At Boston College Law School this semester, a constitutional law professor asked students: “Who does not think we should scrap the constitution?” According to a student in the class, not a single person raised their hand.
Those students and organizations who do dissent often encounter a tsunami of hate. When members of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Federalist Society chapter invited the conservative writer Josh Hammer to campus in October 2021, the law school’s all-student listserv lit up with invective.
“I’d be completely unsurprised (and in fact, willing to bet) that Joshie Hammer fucks (or at least tries to fuck—he probably was rejected repeatedly) we the trannies in his free time,” one student emailed. “Or—more likely—he just wants (and needs) to get just fucked in the ass . . . Maybe our lovely, idiotic FedSoc board is experiencing a similar dilemma within their own psychosexual selves.”
That was nothing compared to what happened at Yale Law School earlier this month, when the school’s chapter of the Federalist Society hosted a bipartisan panel on civil liberties. More than 100 law students disrupted the event, intimidating attendees and attempting to drown out the speakers. When the professor moderating the panel, Kate Stith, told the protesters to “grow up,” they hurled abuse at her and insisted their disturbance was “free speech.”
The fracas caused so much chaos that the police were called. After it ended, the protesters pressured their peers to sign an open letter endorsing their actions and condemning the Federalist Society, which they claimed had “profoundly undermined our community's values of equity and inclusivity.”
“I’m sure you realize that not signing the letter is not a neutral stance,” one student told her class group chat. She was upset that the panel had included Kristen Waggoner of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal nonprofit that’s won a slew of religious liberty cases at the Supreme Court.
As similar messages clogged listservs and Discord forums, nearly two-thirds of Yale Law’s student body wound up signing the letter.
Stith, the professor who was lambasted for telling students to “grow up,” doesn’t see the pile-on as an isolated incident.
“Law schools are in crisis,” she told me. “The truth doesn’t matter much. The game is to signal one’s virtue.”
These days, questioning the efficacy of a vaccine is a nihilistic, anti-scientific assault on society itself. And yet refusing to define the meaning of “woman” — a question a peasant in the medieval world could have correctly, and straightforwardly, answered — is treated as a completely normal moment by the press. Ketanji Brown Jackson says she “not a biologist,” admitting that the definition of “woman” is physiological and not psychological, to avoid offending progressives. She, of course, knows well what a woman is. The fact that such a silly question can’t be directly answered reflects the insanity of the political moment. There is a chasm between arguing that a “society should make accommodations for transgender Americans” and “men can get pregnant,” and yet Democrats are now going with the latter.
Jackson’s answer is also a reminder that the liberals’ rock-ribbed belief in “science” often relies on reverse-engineered junk science concocted to prop up trendy new theories. Liberals are no more interested in science than anyone else. Scaremongering over GMOs, which are not only completely harmless but a lifesaving technological advancement, is anti-science. Opposing fracking, which is as safe as any other means of extracting fossil fuels, is anti-science. Please tell me more about your homeopathic organic cures, enlightened Democrat. However inconvenient it is for proponents of abortion, denying that life begins at conception — “I have a religious view that I set aside when ruling on cases,” went Jackson’s crafty answer — is also anti-science. As is the notion that a person’s perspective can determine whether something is alive or their gender. And you don’t have to be a biologist to understand why.
All of these unfair questions hurled toward Jackson are obviously racist and misogynistic. Completely ridiculous and prove that Jim Crow 2.0 on steroids is alive!! Why can't the R's be civil like the D's were with Kavanaugh...
Did you even read what I wrote? I'll type real slowly so that even the most stunted can understand.
1. CRT is based upon assertions pretending to be facts.
2. CRT has been debunked when presented with facts.
3. CRT uses illustrations of unweighted situational factors as 'proof' of institutional bias, but in reality these may or may not exist on a case by case basis.
4. CRT has been an academic exercise for more than 30 years, and roots for more than 50, with no impact on society. Affirmative action is not based on CRT,
that is a completely different discussion with a different origin. (AA does not deny race as does CRT)
5. Bigots have their panties in a bunch over CRT (Black Panther types, white victimology types.) Thankfully, these clowns are a tiny minority. That what is meant by .0001%. If you truly thought I meant 3300, then you're beyond any help I can provide with your cognitive processes. I'll dumb it down next time.
6. CRT derivatives like the 1619 Project are equally invalid.
Because of my work and social activities, I have a large circle of acquaintances. To my knowledge not single one, regardless of color, race, creed, ethnicity, religion, or national origin has been affected by CRT. I would suspect that more than half have not even heard of CRT. CRT has no basis in fact. It is a big giant nothing burger that only skirt clutchers scream about, because facts are inconvenient.
Jon apparently considers CRT to be trash but has zero clue what school boards are doing. Presumably if schools were trying to conduct lessons based on CRT ideals he’d side with the pearl-clutchers. Presumably if states passed curriculum requirements based on CRT he’d side with pearl-clutchers. Presumably if garbage like 1619 was being taught everywhere, he’d side with the pearl-clutchers.
He, at least, acknowledges how fucking awful it is. He just doesn’t think it actually exists in any meaningful sense, so no harm no foul. It’s going to be a lot of fun to prove the use of CRT and 1619 throughout the country and watch him acknowledge that the pearl-clutchers have a point.
Meanwhile, still LMMFAO at the notion that Rs shouldn’t run on CRT/school board issues. Yeah, if they don’t want to win.
Dan Patrick: What was your reaction to [Urban Meyer being hired]? Brady Hoke: You know.....not....good.
My wife teaches 3rd grade at a public school and they are attempting to get curriculum going at that level next year for CRT teaching so you can't tell me it's a nothing burger. This is in the fucking midwest...IN 3RD FUCKING GRADE. They already are forcing similar shit now to teachers...so she is quitting after this year. My sister teaches in the public schools in NY State...she teaches 5th grade...it's already underway there and has been. She is going to retire partly due to BS like this. Don't tell me it's a fucking "Nothing Burger"...
Look, the R's will cruise to victory. And then eventually go too far, as they always do when parties over-read their mandate, and things will slide back.
Look, the R's will cruise to victory. And then eventually go too far, as they always do when parties over-read their mandate, and things will slide back.
Well, NFS.
However, they can't really over-read their mandate. They're not going to be governing in DC no matter what happens. The Chairman be The Chairman.
In states, this will happen.
The biggest wildcard for 2022, IMO, is the apparently demise of Roe.
Dan Patrick: What was your reaction to [Urban Meyer being hired]? Brady Hoke: You know.....not....good.
However, they can't really over-read their mandate. They're not going to be governing in DC no matter what happens. The Chairman be The Chairman.
In states, this will happen.
The biggest wildcard for 2022, IMO, is the apparently demise of Roe.
True, I'm mainly thinking in states. It's already begun on that level. I'm not sure if even in Oklahoma a ban on ALL abortion has majority support. But would it cause anyone to switch their vote is another question. Maybe not in isolation, but you put it alongside some other conservative social issues being rammed through and maybe.
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