Two federal judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, both appointed by former President Donald Trump, have announced that they will no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law School, in response to the mistreatment of a fellow judge during a recent visit to the school.
Judges James Ho and Elizabeth Branch had previously announced a similar boycott of Yale Law School last year, after a series of free speech incidents in which they complained about the school’s approach to ‘cancel culture.’
The boycotts will only apply to future students and not those currently enrolled as law students at the school.
‘We will not hire any student who chooses to attend Stanford Law School in the future,’ Ho said during a speech to the Texas Review of Law and Politics.
Yale and Stanford Law Schools are some of the most prestigious law schools in the country, having produced some of the nation’s most prominent leaders, including Presidents Bill Clinton and Gerald Ford, at least five current US senators and four current Supreme Court Justices.
US Circuit Judge James Ho has announced that he will no longer hire law clerks from Stanford Law School and Yale Law School
Ho’s boycott of Stanford and Yale has been joined by fellow Donald Trump-appointed Judge J Elizabeth Branch
Ho called the treatment of Fifth Circuit appellate judge Stuart Kyle Duncan ‘intellectual terrorism.’
Duncan was shouted down by hundreds of students and berated by Stanford Diversity Dean Tirien Steinbach during his visit to the law school last month.
Students called him ‘scum,’ asked why he couldn’t ‘find the c***,’ and screamed, ‘We hope your daughters get raped.’
Steinbach is currently on leave and Stanford has ruled out disciplining the hecklers, who by the school’s own admission violated the school’s free speech policy.
Duncan was greeted with posters along the walls of the prestigious university – saying he had committed crimes against women, gays, blacks and ‘trans people’ in reference to a case.
He was asked to give a speech at the famous law school earlier in March about the circuit’s Court of Appeals by the student chapter of the conservative Federalist Society, but was met with abuse.
Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, 51, who was also appointed by Donald Trump, was asked to give a speech at Stanford Law School last month but was met with abuse
Fifth Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan eventually asked for an administrator when the heckling wouldn’t stop and in stepped the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach
Associate Dean Steinbach stepped in during the screaming, but instead of calming the students down, she started lecturing Judge Duncan for six minutes using prepared notes
The Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Tirien Steinbach, is now currently on leave from the prestigious university
Associate Dean Steinbach stepped in during the screaming, but instead of calming the students down, she started piously lecturing Judge Duncan for six minutes using pre-prepared notes.
Law School Dean, Jenny Martinez, and Stanford President, Marc Tessier-Lavinge, have since ‘formally apologized, confirming that protesters and administrators had violated Stanford policy’ days later.
In his speech, Ho argued that the treatment of Duncan reflected ‘rampant’ viewpoint discrimination at elite law schools, some of which do not employ a single center-right professor.
‘Rules aren’t rules without consequences,’ Ho said. ‘And students who practice intolerance don’t belong in the legal profession.’
He implied that a more politically diverse faculty and less ideologically uniform administration would go a long way towards lifting the boycott.
‘How do we know everyone’s views will be protected, if everyone’s views aren’t represented?’, Ho asked.
‘What some law schools tolerate and even encourage today is not intellectual exploration—but intellectual terrorism,’ Ho suggested.
‘Students don’t try to engage and learn from one another. They engage in disruption, intimidation, and public shaming. They try to terrorize people into submission and self-censorship, in a deliberate campaign to eradicate certain viewpoints from the public discourse,’ he added.
‘Law schools like to say that they’re training the next generation of leaders. But schools aren’t even teaching students how to be good citizens—let alone good lawyers. We’re not teaching the basic terms of our democracy.’
Ho’s announcement is the latest and most dramatic effort to hold Stanford accountable for its treatment of Duncan, and he hopes his colleagues will follow suit.
In subsequent interview following the Standford incident, Judge Duncan said the entire debacle was an embarrassment that made him fear for the country’s future.
Judge Ho has previously railed against the woke culture at Yale University and is now targeting Stanford
Ho has urged his fellow judges to likewise boycott the Ivy League institutions, which jave produced several Supreme Court Justices
‘This is one of the best law schools in the world. The students are the cream of the crop. The future judges, senators, presidents, leaders of industry.
‘And yet here is a mob of the best and brightest, shouting down a federal judge who’s been invited to campus, and thereby demonstrating that they don’t have the foggiest grasp of the basic concept of legal discourse: you have to meet reason with reason. Instead, their operating principle is: If I don’t like what you say or think, I will silence you.
‘Unless those students undergo a radical change in their whole approach to argument and disagreement, they are unfit to be members of any bar,’ Duncan said.
He said he sympathized with the other students who had gathered to hear him speak, but who missed out on the chance.
‘The attack was intimately personal and, frankly, disgusting. If I talked to a dog the way those students talked to me, I’d feel ashamed.’
Since announcing the boycott of Yale Law School, Ho and Branch are two of 14 federal judges who are boycotting the school due to a series of high-profile free speech scandals.
The boycott appears to be having an impact, with students and faculty urging Ho not to let up and citing an improved campus climate.
‘Imagine that every judge who says they’re opposed to discrimination at Yale and Stanford takes the same path,’ Ho said. ‘Imagine they decide that, until the discrimination stops, they will no longer hire from those schools in the future. How quickly do we think those schools would stop discriminating then?’
The judges hope that their boycotts will persuade their colleagues to follow suit, and that schools like Yale and Stanford will address their problems with discrimination in order to regain their prestige and reputations as top law schools.
