Category Archive 'Yale Law School'

24 Oct 2022

Dean Gerken Goes Into Damage Control Mode

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Heather Gerken, Dean and Sol & Lillian Goldman Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

David Lat is cautiously optimistic that the Judges’ Boycott of Yale Law graduates for clerkships has put the fear of God (or, at least, grave alarm at the loss of prestigious career opportunities translating into money and power) into the powers that be at the Yale Law School.

In the wake of the announcement of Judge James Ho (5th Cir.) that he would no longer hire clerks from Yale Law School, a boycott joined so far by Judge Lisa Branch (11th Cir.) and a dozen other judges who wanted to remain nameless, Dean Heather Gerken has been quietly reaching out to prominent conservative jurists. Her message: YLS is deeply committed to free speech and intellectual diversity, it has taken concrete steps to support that commitment, and as dean, she welcomes hearing from judges about what else can be done to promote and protect academic freedom at Yale Law—including Judges Ho and Branch, the progenitors of the YLS boycott.1

A week ago today, on Thursday, October 13, Judges Ho and Branch responded to Dean Gerken’s outreach with a letter (which you can download via the embed above). Here’s how it begins:

Wowzers! I share the judges’ hope that the panel can take place before January 17—because I don’t know if I can wait that long for such an epic event.

Substance aside, I suspect that the reception to Judges Ho and Branch will determine whether they actually push through with their boycott (which both judges have explained doesn’t apply to current YLS students and graduates, only future students—so in a sense it hasn’t really taken effect yet). If Judges Ho and Branch receive a cool but ultimately civil reception from Yale Law’s overwhelmingly progressive student body, then I expect the judges to stand down. But if they get shouted down at YLS, as Kristen Waggoner of the ultra-conservative Alliance Defending Freedom did this past March, that will powerfully prove that Yale’s free-speech problems are profound—and might get even more judges to publicly hop on the anti-YLS bandwagon.

The rest of the judges’ four-page letter—which I urge you to read in full, along with Judge Ho’s forthcoming article in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Agreeing to Disagree: Restoring American by Resisting Cancel Culture—is an eloquent defense of free speech, open discourse, and civil disagreement. The last two pages respond to a statement by Dean Gerken that was posted on the YLS website last Wednesday, October 12, A Message to Our Alumni on Free Speech at Yale Law School (“Alumni Message”). So I’ll walk you through that statement now, offering reporting and opinion of my own, as well as comments from the Ho/Branch letter. (The Alumni Message was previously covered by Karen Sloan and Nate Raymond of Reuters, Brad Kutner of the National Law Journal, and Debra Cassens Weiss of the ABA Journal.)

Here’s how Dean Gerken’s Alumni Message begins (all hyperlinks in the original):

    Dear members of our alumni community:

    Yale Law School is dedicated to building a vibrant intellectual environment where ideas flourish. To foster free speech and engagement, we emphasize the core values of professionalism, integrity, and respect. These foundational values guide everything we do.

So far, so good. Please proceed, Dean Gerken.

    Over the last six months, we have taken a number of concrete steps to reaffirm our enduring commitment to the free and unfettered exchange of ideas. These actions are well known to our faculty, students, and staff, but I want to share some of them with you as well.

    Last March, the Law School made unequivocally clear that attempts to disrupt events on campus are unacceptable and violate the norms of the School, the profession, and our community.

I don’t view Dean Gerken’s statement on the infamous March 10 protest as making “unequivocally clear” that what transpired was unacceptable; to the contrary, I found her statement rather… equivocating. But instead of repeating myself, I’ll simply incorporate by reference my earlier exegesis of her comments. I would also refer you to page 3 of the Ho/Branch letter, in which the judges similarly criticize YLS’s handling of the March 10 protest and refute the attempt to defend that handling.

Back to the Alumni Message:

    The faculty revised our disciplinary code and adopted a policy prohibiting surreptitious recordings that mirrors policies that the University of Chicago and other peer institutions have put in place to encourage the free expression of ideas.

I will spare you—and me—from a painstaking parsing of the updated disciplinary code, which runs to seven single-spaced pages. For now, here’s a concise explanation of the latest revisions that was provided to me by Professor Claire Priest, who served on the faculty committee responsible for the changes:

    I am writing because it was so disappointing to hear that Judge Ho and other judges called for a hiring freeze on YLS clerks due to the disruptive protests against Alliance Defending Freedom last year. Since last January, I have served on a committee led by Professors Oona Hathaway and Tracey Meares that rewrote the rules of the law school. One of the first revisions we made clarified that “reckless” disruptions of law school events are major violations of the code.

    Since the 1970s, the school has been governed by the Rights and Duties (“R&D”), which was poorly written and vague, and resulted in an environment where the Dean and administrators were effectively in charge of all discipline. After the ADF protest, Dean Heather Gerken constituted a committee to rewrite the rules to make it explicit that reckless disruption of classes, events, and the business of the law school will constitute a major violation of our rules going forward. Unfortunately, we did not feel we could publicize this until September 21, when the faculty unanimously voted for the new code. The revised code also clarifies the procedures we will use and takes much of the disciplinary work out of the hands of our student-facing administrators.

One thing I’d highlight from Professor Priest’s message: the committee that led the R&D revision was appointed last January—after the scandals known as Dinner Party-gate, Trap House-gate, and Antiracism Training-gate, but before Protest-gate, and well before the Ho-led boycott. So while Judge Ho can take credit for highlighting YLS’s free-speech problems and restarting the conversation about them after the summer break, the process of revising the R&D was underway long before that.

RTWT

Yale’s administrators are very good at wining, dining, and brown-nosing influential squeaky wheels and beyond that, this particular threat definitely impacts Dean Gerken’s own prospects of survival in office, so it may very well be that, at least to some extent, henceforward the power of campus radicals to cancel speech and appearances by public figures they do not like will (for practical reasons, not principle) wind up thrown under the Free Speech bus.

15 May 2022

Yale Law Students Want to Punish Fellow Classmates and Throw Out the Constitution

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They don’t like the framers or the Constitution. They subscribe to the ridiculous radical leftist version of American History in which the United States was founded as a conspiracy to benefit rich White men exclusively. They oppose Free Speech and are eager to punish anyone who disagrees with them.

These are the best and the brightest, the creme of the crop, the elitest of the elite, the final product of the American system of Meritocracy, hand-picked to study at Yale Law School, the Number One, top-rated law school in the United States. These are the rising stars who will clerk for Supreme Court justices, who will be hired with six figure signing bonuses by the top law firms in the country. These are the people who will teach Constitutional Law at Harvard and Yale. These people are members of the tiny group from which one day in the future the next Supreme Court justice will be selected.

Jesus wept.

Washington Free Beacon:

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for students at Yale Law School, who are responding to news that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade with calls to accost their conservative classmates through “unrelenting daily confrontation” and toss the Constitution by the wayside.

Members of the law school’s conservative Federalist Society, first year law student Shyamala Ramakrishna said in an Instagram post, are “conspirators in the Christo-fascist political takeover we all seem to be posting frantically about.” Why, she asked, are they still “coming to our parties” and “laughing in the library” without “unrelenting daily confrontation?”

Some of her classmates were less moderate.

“It’s not time for ‘reform,’” first-year law student Leah Fessler, a onetime New York Times freelancer, wrote on Instagram. “Democratic Institutions won’t save us.” It is unclear how Fessler will apply that view as a legal intern this summer for federal judge Lewis Liman. Judge Liman did not respond to a request for comment.

Fessler isn’t alone. “Neither the constitution nor the courts—nor the fucking illusion of ‘democracy’—are going to save us,” first-year student Melisa Olgun posted. “How can we possibly expect a document, drafted by wealthy, white, landowning men, to protect those who face marginalization that is the direct result of the very actions of the founders?”

Contacted for comment, the students decried “leaks” of their social media posts and said the Washington Free Beacon was not “authorized” to publish them.

“This was posted PRIVATELY, on a private story, and was clearly leaked to you,” Fessler said in an email, adding that the Free Beacon was “in no way authorized” to use the message.

“The post was on a private account on a private story that was sent to you without my knowledge,” Olgun said. “You are in no way authorized to use it or my name in your story.”

The replies may have been a tacit invocation of copyright laws that ban the dissemination of photos without their owner’s consent. Publishing private Instagram posts, a lawyer might argue, violates intellectual property rights, though Adam Candeub, an intellectual property expert at Michigan State University College of Law, called that argument “bullshit.”

“It’s not clear copyright would even apply,” Candeub said. “I wonder what they’re teaching at Yale Law School.”

Eugene Volokh, a professor of First Amendment law at UCLA School of Law, said the copyright argument was a stretch. Jack Balkin, a First Amendment professor at Yale Law School, did not respond to a request for comment.

The reactions at Yale Law School, long ranked the top school in the country, reflect the radicalism of a younger generation of law students—and, some have speculated, of the leaker himself—who believe that long-standing legal norms perpetuate oppression.

Olgun, for one, lamented that the “‘liberal’ legal discipline will continue to bend over backwards to uphold the decorum, norms, and the sanctity of an institution that serves only those who benefit from originalism.”

Such sentiments are widespread at Yale Law School. In March, nearly two-thirds of the student body signed an open letter condemning the Federalist Society for hosting a bipartisan panel on free speech.

RTWT

03 Apr 2022

Yale Law School Today

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John Hinderaker at Power-Line:

[L]ast month, a group of fascist Yale Law students successfully shouted down a Federalist Society program that featured a dialogue between a leftist and a representative of the Alliance Defending Freedom. The protest was rowdy enough that police were summoned to maintain order.

Now, more than 400 Yale Law students, representing over 60 percent of the student body, have signed a pathetically weak letter to the law school’s administration protesting the fact that law enforcement was called to keep the peace. The letter would be dumb if it came from a group of 7th graders. The fact that it comes from law students reflects the catastrophic decline of education in America.

RTWT

19 Oct 2021

Even Rejoinders to the Woke Are Woke These Days

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Andrew Koppelman, John Paul Stevens Professor of Law and professor of political science at Northwestern University.

Professor Koppelman wrote a generally extremely sound essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education (mostly a red rag, full of left-wing stupidity) commenting on some Yale Law School students’ and its Administration’s hysterical response to a student’s Constitution Day Party invitation.

However, the good professor opens the piece with a conspicuous bit of assurance that his head is in the Left Place ideologically. Catch this! (Use Outline link, because of paywall.)

The movement for diversity and inclusion has improved people’s lives in many tangible ways. A few days ago at Northwestern Law School, where I’m a professor, I went into the men’s restroom and saw that the school had provided tampons and sanitary pads on a shelf there. It made me happy. There are people here who menstruate and identify as male. Their needs matter, and the school now recognizes that.

But in other respects…

Jesus, Mary, and Freddie! Obviously hanging out with the loonies and wet ends teaching at contemporary elite universities addles the brain and assimilates even normal, well-educated people into group insanity.

Let me break it to you, Professor Koppelman: “People ..who menstruate and identify as male” need their heads examined a lot more than they need special accommodation in lavatories intended for men who pee standing up.

Where does the group insanity that makes the Modern University a hive of totalitarian crackpottery and the enemy of America, Western Civilization, and even the Liberal Ideal of Free Speech originate? It starts with the moral cowardice that declines to stand up in opposition to any complaint or demand, however absurd, irrational, or insolent, from anyone or any group bullying with the moral jiu jitsu of Victimhood.

But, as I’ve acknowledged, if you excerpt that paragraph of Woke Wankery, its a good essay that hits Yale Law’s nail solidly in the head.

RTWT

13 Oct 2021

Yale Law School Administrators Find Reference to the Federalist Society “Triggering”

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Yale Law School

The Washington Free Beacon has absolutely appalling news from Yale.

Administrators at Yale Law School spent weeks pressuring a student to apologize for a “triggering” email in which he referred to his apartment as a “trap house,” a slang term for a place where people buy drugs. Part of what made the email “triggering,” the administrators told the student, was his membership in a conservative organization.

The second-year law student, a member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative Federalist Society, had invited classmates to an event cohosted by the two groups. “We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House … by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc,” he wrote in a Sept. 15 email to the Native American listserv. In keeping with the theme, he said, the mixer would serve “American-themed snacks” like “Popeye’s chicken” and “apple pie.”…

Within minutes, the lighthearted invite had been screenshotted and shared to an online forum for all second-year law students, several of whom alleged that the term “trap house” indicated a blackface party.

“I guess celebrating whiteness wasn’t enough,” the president of the Black Law Students Association wrote in the forum. “Y’all had to upgrade to cosplay/black face.” She also objected to the mixer’s affiliation with the Federalist Society, which she said “has historically supported anti-Black rhetoric.”

“Trap house” has been a term used in progressive pop culture since at least 2016, when the socialist podcast “Chapo Trap House” burst onto the scene. Hosted by three white men, the podcast has received sympathetic profiles in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Guardian, none of which suggest that there is anything racial about its name. Once associated with inner city crack dens, “trap house” has also become generic slang for any place where young people can score beer. …

Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message.

At a Sept. 16 meeting, which the student recorded and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word “trap” connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface. Those “triggering associations,” Eldik said, were “compounded by the fried chicken reference,” which “is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S.”

Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society had “triggered” his peers.

“The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities,” Eldik said. “That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.”

The statement signals that administrators at the country’s top-ranked law school now regard membership in mainstream conservative circles as a legitimate object of offense—and as potential grounds for discipline. The Federalist Society, founded by Yale Law students in 1982, has spread nationwide over the past four decades and become one of most influential legal groups in the country. Members include all six conservative justices on the Supreme Court, as well as the late Antonin Scalia, who spoke at the society’s inaugural conference.

RTWT

HT: Glenn Reynolds.

The Civil Rights Movement of the last century has metastasized into an aggressive form of totalitarianism bent on eliminating freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of thought. The current Woke regime makes Jim Crow look positively benign.

10 Apr 2021

Yale Law Cancelling Amy Chua

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Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School.

Amy Chua is best known for her 2011 book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mom, advocating strict parenting and inculcation of the East Asian hard work ethic.

In 2015, she doubled-down with The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, which contended that American groups exhibiting conspicuous achievement and success had three common characteristic features: “A superiority complex, insecurity [i.e. a need to prove oneself], and impulse control.”

Her values and perspective fly in the face of the Left’s politics of Identity Group helpless victimization and grievance culture. So it should not be surprising that Yale Law School and the undergraduate newspaper are both going after Amy Chua.

She is being cancelled, we learn, for the hideous and outrageous crime of hosting private dinner parties, and (The horror! The horror!) sharing alcoholic beverages with Yale Law students and prominent members of the legal community.

Law students are all obviously over 21 and of legal drinking age, but apparently Chua was warned off any outside school socializing with law students in 2019 as a result of her husband Jed Rubenfeld receiving a two-year suspension after a Me-Too-style witch hunt investigation into rather vaporous accusations of “disparate treatment and boundary crossing” with females, drinking with students, “inappropriate employment practices,” and “retaliation against disloyal students.”

When I was at Yale, middle-aged male professors had affairs with attractive grad students and even sometimes with teenage undergrad coeds, and nobody thought this was a problem. The girls were of the age of consent, after all, and college students were thought to be entitled to live as adults.

So, with new allegations of recent off-campus dining and wine-bibbing with adult students and distinguished jurists, Yale Law School apparently moved silently to deprive Amy Chua of a minor academic responsibility, leading first-year small groups, and leaked details of her punishment and supposed disgrace to the Oldest College Daily before even notifying Chua.

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Chua’s letter to her Law School Colleagues.

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Yale Daily News hit piece.

01 Apr 2019

Yale Law Blacklists Conservative, Christian Public Interest Groups and Organizations

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Yale Law School

The Federalist:

After the Yale Federalist Society invited an attorney from Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a prominent Christian legal group, to speak about the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, conservative students faced backlash. Outlaws, the law school’s LGBTQ group, demanded that Yale Law School “clarify” its admissions policies for students who support ADF’s positions. Additionally, Outlaws insisted that students who work for religious or conservative public interest organizations such as ADF during their summers should not receive financial support from the law school.

On March 25, one month after the controversy, Yale Law School announced via email that it was extending its nondiscrimination policy to summer public interest fellowships, postgraduate public interest fellowships, and loan forgiveness for public interest careers. The school will no longer provide financial support for students and graduates who work at organizations that discriminate on the basis of “sexual orientation and gender identity and expression.”

Yale based its decision on a unanimous recommendation from the school’s Public Interest Committee. The committee explained: “The logic of our broader recommendation is that Yale Law School does not and should not support discrimination against its own students, financially or otherwise. Obviously, the Law School cannot prohibit a student from working for an employer who discriminates, but that is not a reason why Yale Law School should bear any obligation to fund that work, particularly if that organization does not give equal employment opportunity to all of our students.”

The law school also thanked Outlaws for raising this issue.

RTWT

Discriminating against Christians and Conservatives who do not accept the Party Line on Gender and Sexual Orientation Equality, on the other hand, is morally obligatory.

08 Oct 2018

Slate: “Tiger Mom’s Husband is a Witch!”

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Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld.

If anybody doubts that #MeToo Feminism amounts to witch-hunting, he just needs to read this article in Slate, describing (with avidity) how Yale Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld (husband of “Tiger Mom” Amy Chua) needed to be investigated for making a young lady “uncomfortable” through personal conversations or by complimenting her (!) The beast!

One afternoon late in her first year at Yale Law School, Linda sat down to create a contemporaneous record of a conversation she’d had the night before. She’d met with one of her professors, Jed Rubenfeld, in his office after hours at his suggestion, following repeated attempts to see him in the afternoon about a paper she was working on for him. Rubenfeld had made her uncomfortable throughout the year, commenting on her appearance and asking her about his. While friends had told her she had reason to feel creeped out by his behavior, Linda wondered whether she was being too sensitive and agreed to the 8 p.m. meeting. She really needed to make progress on the paper, after all. But given the queasy feeling she already had, she asked her partner to pick her up that night, and to come looking for her if he hadn’t heard from her after a reasonable amount of time.

Per Linda’s record, written the next day and shared with us recently, her conversation with Rubenfeld that evening quickly veered away from her paper. The professor asked her, “Why aren’t you married?” When Linda tried to steer the conversation to safe ground—mentioning how young she was and inquiring about his own marriage to fellow Yale Law School professor Amy Chua—Rubenfeld brought the focus back to her. He asked if she’d been the smartest girl in her high school, then if she’d been the prettiest. When she again deflected, he asked if her smarts had made things tough with the guys in school. The conversation meandered from there and never returned to her paper. Eventually, Rubenfeld said they should get going. By the time they left, Linda’s partner had come to look for her.

Linda, who today is a recent YLS alum, spent the rest of that academic year agonizing over what to do about her uncomfortable interactions with Rubenfeld, and experiencing more of them. One in particular sticks out: The Saturday night after exams wrapped up, Rubenfeld called her cellphone—the first time he had ever done that, she says. He said they’d never gotten a chance to talk about that paper and asked if she was free to do that now. Linda said she was busy preparing to leave New Haven and couldn’t meet, but said she was happy to talk on the phone. They had what Linda describes as a 30-second conversation about the paper before Rubenfeld quickly ended the call, saying he’d see her in September.

That summer, Linda spoke to Yale Law School’s Title IX coordinator. (Linda is a pseudonym, and to preserve her anonymity, we have chosen not to name the Title IX coordinator at the time, as it would identify her class year.) Her goal was twofold: She wanted to start a paper trail about Rubenfeld’s behavior, and she was looking for advice on what her options were for engaging the school’s Title IX process, the government-mandated means of investigating and stopping gender-based discrimination. According to Linda, the Title IX coordinator at the time told her at the very beginning of the call that if Linda named the professor during their conversation and the allegations were sufficiently serious, the coordinator would have to file a formal report. Once that process began, the coordinator said, Linda’s anonymity could not be guaranteed.
This was several years before #MeToo, and the prevailing wisdom at the time was that women should just lean in and push through when things got weird.

This put Linda in an enormously tough position. Schools need to protect the accused as well as the accusers, so it makes sense that Yale would ask women, or anyone alleging misbehavior, to attach their names to allegations. But it also makes sense that attaching her name would be incredibly difficult for Linda: Rubenfeld hadn’t just advised her on a paper. He also taught one of her courses, and he’d been her “small group” professor during the fall semester. (At Yale, each first-year law student is assigned to a 16- or 17-person small group. Those students take all of their courses together, including one course with just their group that’s led by one professor.) Until that April late-night meeting, Linda had generally considered Rubenfeld her advocate. She was counting on him to be one of her references on her clerkship applications, which she needed to submit soon after returning to campus in the fall. She worried that if she made a report or even told the Title IX coordinator his name, it could get back to Rubenfeld and she’d lose his support. This could undermine her chance to earn a prestigious clerkship with a federal judge—which would then make it harder for her to continue to pursue competitive opportunities, like the holy grail for Yale Law School students: a clerkship on the Supreme Court.

Linda was left with two terrible options: She could protect her clerkship prospects by subjecting herself to more unwelcome flirtation, or she could ask Yale to investigate Rubenfeld.

RTWT

Amazing stuff.

When I was at Yale, I had a professor who had a wonderful voice and a superb accent in the poetry of another language. His seminar was filled with gorgeous female grad students beautiful enough to be models, who were commonly visibly aroused, breathing heavily, as he read aloud. He was a lady-killer, with a glint in his eye. The girls adored him, and he made one of them after another his lover. I suspect he left behind a lot of happy memories, but, it’s a good thing he’s gone. Boy! they’d string him up today.

01 Feb 2013

“F*** You, Fellow Yale Law Students!”

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Hallway, Yale Law School

A letter posted to the Yale Law School listserv by an alleged soon-to-graduate third year student expressed hostility toward his politically correct schoolmates in such vehement and colorful terms that it was published on the legal blog Above the Law and is being discussed on other sites (1 and 2).

Dear tYLS or tWall or whatever dumb shit you call it these days:

I am a second-semester 3L. How exciting. In a surprising turn of events, I decided I want to work for a couple of years at a law firm but eventually try to become a published author, or, if that fails, get a Ph.D. and try to become a professor.

Why am I telling you all of this? It’s because I wanted to thank you all for inspiring me to follow my passions and my dreams. Specifically, these passions and dreams are writing and making fun of people.

I realized I hate law and politics. Why? Because I literally hate like 90% of you, and honestly I don’t really feel like going down the path that involves being stuck with even more people like you who literally have no sense of humor and get offended over literally everything. You think Clarence Thomas hates YLS? Clarence Thomas ain’t got SHIT on me.

I’ve watched as you guys get offended over the dumbest shit and wax political over the dumbest shit. LOL. I mean wow, and seriously, this fucking school. If the sticks up your asses were any larger, you guys would give Muslim extremists a run for their money. …

Read the whole thing.

17 Oct 2010

Batman is a Yale Graduate

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The Hon. Mark Dwyer, Judge of the Court of Claims (Supreme Court of the State of New York, Yale Law 1975) clearly still collects and reads comic books, since he discovered and informed the Yale Law Library that on page 16 of Detective Comics No. 439 (March 1974), there is a framed “Diploma of Law” from Yale University in Gotham City on the wall of Bruce Wayne’s study.

Judge Dwyer’s discovery was featured recently in an exhibition in the Yale Law Library‘s Rare Book Gallery.

Hat tip to Ann Tiffin Taylor.

30 Mar 2009

Obama Appoints Internationalist Yale Law School Dean to be State Department Legal Advisor

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Meghan Clyne, in the New York Post, sees the appointment of ultraleftist Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh to the top legal position in the State Department as a step toward putting Koh on the Supreme Court.

Judges should interpret the Constitution according to other nations’ legal “norms.” Sharia law could apply to disputes in US courts. The United States constitutes an “axis of disobedience” along with North Korea and Saddam-era Iraq.

Those are the views of the man on track to become one of the US government’s top lawyers: Harold Koh.

President Obama has nominated Koh — until last week the dean of Yale Law School — to be the State Department’s legal adviser. In that job, Koh would forge a wide range of international agreements on issues from trade to arms control, and help represent our country in such places as the United Nations and the International Court of Justice.

It’s a job where you want a strong defender of America’s sovereignty. But that’s not Koh. He’s a fan of “transnational legal process,” arguing that the distinctions between US and international law should vanish. …

Koh has called America’s focus on the War on Terror “obsessive.” In 2004, he listed countries that flagrantly disregard international law — “most prominently, North Korea, Iraq, and our own country, the United States of America,” which he branded “the axis of disobedience.”

He has also accused President George Bush of abusing international law to justify the invasion of Iraq, comparing his “advocacy of unfettered presidential power” to President Richard Nixon’s. And that was the first Bush — Koh was attacking the 1991 operation to liberate Kuwait, four days after fighting began in Operation Desert Storm.

Koh has also praised the Nicaraguan Sandinistas’ use in the 1980s of the International Court of Justice to get Congress to stop funding the Contras. Imagine such international lawyering by rogue nations like Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela today, and you can see the danger in Koh’s theories.

Koh, a self-described “activist,” would plainly promote his views aggressively once at State. He’s not likely to feel limited by the letter of the law — in 1994, he told The New Republic: “I’d rather have [former Supreme Court Justice Harry] Blackmun, who uses the wrong reasoning in Roe [v. Wade] to get the right results, and let other people figure out the right reasoning.”

Worse, the State job might be a launching pad for a Supreme Court nomination. (He’s on many liberals’ short lists for the high court.) Since this job requires Senate confirmation, it’s certainly a useful trial run.

More background, from Volokh.


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