What is the point of going to law school if you are an enemy of the rule of law?

Power, of course. It is about getting and abusing power.

I don’t know how many law schools in America are filled with power-hungry totalitarian students, but I suspect that most of the elite schools are, and most of the more pedestrian ones are not. Stanford, being one of the former, is apparently filled with budding tyrants.

In the wake of Stanford’s weak, almost pointless apology to Judge Duncan after the shameful fiasco Stanford administrators abetted last week, something like 1/3rd of Stanford Law’s student body participated in a protest against the Stanford Law Dean who signed that apology to the judge.

As if the apology was too strong, not too weak.

The original behavior of the students–shouting down, insulting his sexual prowess, and physically crowding him out of the lecture hall was unforgivable and indeed should not have been forgiven as it apparently has been.

Even worse, the participation of Stanford’s DEI Dean in haranguing the judge should have gotten her immediately fired. In her rant against the judge she referred to Stanford’s free speech policy, and then blatantly violated it. Also unforgivable.

Yesterday’s student protests made the situation, if anything, far worse. Students turned their ire and their fire at the Stanford Dean and Law School professor, intimidating her and reinforcing their contempt for Stanford’s policies and ultimately the rule of law.

None of those students should be allowed to continue their studies.

Aaron Sibarium of The Washington Free Beacon has done wonderful work covering the events and the controversy and deserves credit for following the story in a way that nobody else seems determined to. What is at stake is the integrity of our legal system, as Stanford along with Yale and Harvard helps set the tone for the next generation of legal scholars and judges.

Hundreds of Stanford student activists on Monday lined the hallways to protest the law school’s dean, Jenny Martinez, for apologizing to Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan, whom the activists shouted down last week.

The embattled dean arrived to the classroom where she teaches constitutional law to find a whiteboard covered inch to inch in fliers attacking Duncan and defending those who disrupted him, according to photos of the room and multiple eyewitness accounts. The fliers parroted the argument, made by student activists, that the heckler’s veto is a form of free speech.

“We, the students in your constitutional law class, are sorry for exercising our 1st Amendment rights,” some fliers read. As a private law school, Stanford is not bound by the First Amendment.

The students have First Amendment rights, of course. What they don’t have a right to is continued education from an endorsement of the Stanford Law School. Allowing them to get a J.D. from the school would clearly be an endorsement of their behavior.

Nor did they have a right to engage in their offensive tactics on Stanford’s private property in violation of Stanford’s policies. They could shout all they want on public land, but not in that room. That isn’t how it works.

Law students should have learned that by now. It’s not like any of them would tolerate somebody walking into their apartment and shouting at them.

The protest followed a flurry of open letters from student activists, who spent much of the weekend berating Martinez after she and Stanford University president Marc Tessier-Lavigne issued a formal apology to Duncan condemning the students who disrupted his talk and the administrators who stood by silently and watched them do so.

The apology also took a swipe at Tirien Steinbach, the law school’s associate dean of diversity, equity, and inclusion, who interrupted Duncan to lecture him about the “harm” he’d caused.

When Martinez’s class adjourned on Monday, the protesters, dressed in black and wearing face masks that read “counter-speech is free speech,” stared silently at Martinez as she exited her first-year constitutional law class at 11:00 a.m., according to five students who witnessed the episode. The student protesters, who formed a human corridor from Martinez’s classroom to the building’s exit, comprised nearly a third of the law school, the students told the Washington Free Beacon.

We have already seen such behavior out in the wild, so to speak. During the George Floyd protests two lawyers were throwing Molotov cocktails, and a Southern Poverty Law Center lawyer was arrested for domestic terrorism in Atlanta.

23 suspects in #Atlanta have been charged with domestic terrorism following the violent ambush attack to try to retake their lost autonomous zone occupation. I investigated their backgrounds. One is an @splcenter staff attorney. Others are teachers or https://t.co/43uztHJOzD… https://t.co/lHpkYulECG

— Andy Ngô 🏳️‍🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) March 6, 2023

Our higher education system is utterly corrupt, educating and graduating students who are determined to tear down the very system they are supposed to protect. They are tyrannical, and the institutions that are supposed to shape them to participate in our system of government are instead educating them to destroy it.

The rot is worst among the most privileged, the people who are or will be the elite. Most students who attend law school want to be lawyers, not revolutionaries. Yet it is the revolutionaries who are being groomed to dominate the system.

If Stanford Law School can’t defend the rule of law, it has no business being in the business of teaching law. Of course, that has probably been true for a long time.

For a different though dovetailing take, John wrote about the protest earlier today.