Free speech under attack — at two law schools

Twice this month, students at two law schools at opposite ends of the country threw temper tantrums. They didn’t like what conservative speakers had to say, so they did what woke progressive students do in these situations — they shouted the speakers down.  

First there was Ilya Shapiro, a scholar at Georgetown University, who was suspended just before beginning the Georgetown job for tweeting his opposition to President Biden’s decision to limit his Supreme Court nominee pool by race and sex.  

Shapiro had said that Sri Srinivasan, the chief judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia — a man born in India — would have been the best pick for the seat that Justice Stephen Breyer is vacating and, as he explained in the Wall Street Journal, “that everyone else was less qualified, so if Mr. Biden kept his promise, he would pick what, given Twitter’s character limit, I characterized as a ‘lesser black woman.’ I deleted the tweet and apologized for my inartful choice of words, but I stand by my view that Mr. Biden should have considered ‘all possible nominees,’ as 76 percent of Americans agreed in an ABC News poll.” 

On March 1, Shapiro was set to speak at San Francisco’s UC Hastings College of the Law, but a group of students wouldn’t allow that to happen. “It’s clear that a vocal minority of Hastings students wanted to hear neither my reasoning about Mr. Biden’s selection criteria nor my broader analysis now that there is a nominee,” he wrote. “They screamed obscenities and physically confronted me, several times getting in my face or blocking my access to the lectern, and they shouted down a dean.”

Ten days later, at a conference on civil liberties and free speech at Yale Law School, students didn’t want to hear what a conservative speaker from an organization that promotes religious liberty had to say, so they did what the students in San Francisco had done about a week earlier: They heckled the speaker and wouldn’t let her talk. One protester reportedly said she would “literally fight you, bitch.” Police had to move in and escort both the conservative speaker, and the progressive she was supposed to debate, out of the building for their safety. 

But there was a twist to the story. A federal judge heard about the ruckus at Yale and wrote a letter to his fellow federal judges all over the United States. In it, Senior Judge Laurence Silberman of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said that since “all federal judges are presumably committed to free speech,” they should give serious thought to disqualifying the Yale students from ever getting coveted jobs as clerks to federal judges.

This, potentially, is a big deal because clerking for a federal judge could lead to all sorts of goodies — high-paying jobs at prestigious law firms, judgeships, maybe even a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court someday. If they didn’t care about free speech, the judge evidently was thinking, maybe they’d care about their careers. 

Let’s be clear: At neither school were these protesters freshmen students feeling their oats. They were law school students, who, as Shapiro pointed out, “should have a particular appreciation for spirited and open engagement with provocative ideas. They’ve chosen a career that centers on argument and persuasion.”

If you’re wondering what kind of punishment these students have been subjected to, you can stop wondering. Even though both schools have rules against such disruptions, no punishment appears to be in the cards.

That’s hardly a surprise. Those who run many American colleges are what amounts to “potted plants” — they meekly go along with this authoritarian nonsense, most likely because they’re afraid to take on bullies on their campuses, fearing the kind of heckling and name-calling that the students have used against conservatives with “unacceptable” ideas.

In the 1950s, it was the left in America that was in the crosshairs of the cancel culture, even though it didn’t go by that name back then. The left were victims of the blacklist. Now, it’s anti-free speech hooligans on college campuses who apparently are channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy and shutting down ideas they find offensive.  

On his show “Real Time” on HBO, Bill Maher once said that “cancel culture is real, it’s insane and it’s coming to a neighborhood near you.” Maher is a man of the left, but he’s an old-fashioned liberal who believes in free speech. If we need more liberals in society — an iffy proposition, as far as I’m concerned — we need the kind like Bill Maher.

Cancel culture, of course, has already come to more than a few college campuses, where hypersensitive cupcakes scream and yell, so they won’t have to listen to ideas they don’t like.  But you’d think law school students would know better. 

After graduation, these students in all probability will become lawyers. Some of them will defend people who have done terrible things, and not just white-collar terrible things. Some will become public defenders and speak for people charged with murder. Some will defend child molesters. Some will even offer a zealous defense of terrorists. That’s what lawyers do. They defend their clients. That’s what the Constitution demands. 

But there are some things their moral code just won’t allow. There are some bright lines they simply will not cross. And listening to a conservative on campus, without jumping up and down and yelling, apparently is one of those things.

It would be funny if it weren’t pathetic.

Bernard Goldberg is an Emmy and an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University award-winning writer and journalist. He was a correspondent with HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel” for 22 years and previously worked as a reporter for CBS News and as an analyst for Fox News. He is the author of five books and publishes exclusive weekly columns, audio commentaries and Q&As on his Patreon page. Follow him on Twitter @BernardGoldberg.