Posted on 10/06/2018 7:13:20 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
New Haven realism was supposed to redeem the nation. Instead it gave us New Haven Nietzscheanism. ‘Like Saturn,” Jacques Mallet du Pan said of the French Revolution, it “devours its children.”
The same might be said of Yale Law School.
Cory Booker (Yale Law ’97) broke Senate rules to release documents he hoped would undermine Brett Kavanaugh (Yale Law ’90) in Kavanaugh’s quest for a Supreme Court seat, while Ronan Farrow (Yale Law ’09) published a New Yorker piece containing uncorroborated allegations that Kavanaugh exposed himself to a fellow student at a Yale dorm party.
An old boys’ club, as some news-gathering organizations have naïvely suggested? More like the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs in Dante’s Florence, ever ready to plunge a dagger in a former brother’s back.
Scarcely had the allegations against the judge been leaked to the press than other graduates of the school turned with a vengeance on one of their professors, Amy Chua, author of 'Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother'.
She, it is alleged, “was known for instructing female law students who were preparing for interviews with Kavanaugh on ways they could dress to exude a ‘model-like’ femininity to help them win a post in Kavanaugh’s chambers.”
When told that Chua denied the allegations, a young Yale Law School alumna was succinct: “She’s lying.”
It transpires that Chua’s husband, another professor in the school, is himself in trouble with his students. According to the Guardian, Jed Rubenfeld, whose specialty is detective novels, has been accused of inappropriate conduct with female scholars under his tuition and is the subject of an internal investigation by the university.
If, like Mallet du Pan’s France, Yale is consuming its own, it is in part because it, too, has suffered a revolution, one that has worked out about as well as Robespierre’s did.
Yale Legal Realists such as William O. Douglas changed the face of American law when they argued that judges should decide cases in ways that advance their own personal notions of progress, the whole while conning rubes with a show of old-fashioned jurisprudence, fidelity to precedent, etc.
Under what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. called the “Yale thesis,” the “judge chooses his result and reasons backward.” Emancipated from traditional methods of applying the law, the liberated jurist chucks Hamiltonian least-dangerous-branch sentimentalities and becomes a Numa or Hammurabi in his own right.
The cynical philosophy that supplied the intellectual justification for the Warren Court corrupted several generations of young Yale minds. “All we ever had was a tradition,” the great Constitutional scholar Alexander Bickel lamented to his Yale colleague Robert Bork, “and now that is shattered.” What remained was “personal preference and personal power and nothing else.”
Yale Law School became a seminary of realpolitik in a very nearly Bismarckian sense, devoted to a philosophy of personal and party power concealed beneath the fig leaf of civic virtue that Professor Bruce Ackerman attempted to supply when he argued that in eras of intense public passion, jurists and politicians can revise the Constitution in blatant disregard of the amending procedures specified in Article V.
To get what you want, you do what you have to do.
If, as alleged by her students, Professor Chua counseled prospective law clerks to dress in a way that would catch a judge’s eye, she was only living up to the New Haven Nietzscheanism that the dying Bickel deplored.
You do what you have to. (O my sisters, are you evil enough for this truth?)
To be sure, the Legal Realism that altered the character of Yale Law School was only one aspect of a broader revolution in the culture that relaxed restraints on the pursuit and exercise of power by the talented.
The roots of today’s establishment are found in the decades that followed the Civil War, when the Brahmin traditions of the old upper crust were breaking down in Gilded Age vulgarity. Educators in Ivy League colleges and New England prep schools consciously sought to mold a new governing class, a public-spirited patriciate that would provide leadership for the American Century they saw on the horizon.
The establishment they created was narrow and privileged, all but entirely white and male, and overburdened with preppies who had bonded in drinking rituals in Skull and Bones and the Porcellian Club. Yet it rendered a quantity of first-rate public service, and prepared the way for the more open and diverse meritocracy we know today.
Under FDR’s leadership the patricians helped defeat Hitler, and with the counsel of the Wise Men laid the groundwork for the West’s victory in the Cold War. In the same years, WASPs such as Henry Chauncey (Groton ’23, Harvard College ’28) developed the SAT, a crucial step in the Ivy League’s transition from privilege to merit.
Yet perhaps the greatest achievement of the WASP establishment was its ability to subordinate the desire for power to an ethic of service. Deeply enamored though they were of authority, the old magnificos accepted limits. Averell Harriman was aghast when Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, undermined Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. “If I had gotten in the way of the relationship between the President and the Secretary of State,” Harriman said of his own service in the Truman administration, “I would have been fired, and properly so.”
Today the code by which the patrician establishment at least tried to live — its ideas of duty and honor, of good manners and seemly three-martini lunches, of public service conceived as an almost religious undertaking performed in the sight of God — is an antediluvian curiosity.
Already in 1969, Robert F. Kennedy’s civil-rights maven, Burke Marshall (Yale Law ’51), flouted the code and degraded himself when he hurried to Ted Kennedy’s side in Hyannis to help cover up the killing of a young woman at Chappaquiddick. Two decades later, George H. W. Bush kicked what remained of tradition to the curb when he availed himself of the services of Lee Atwater.
You do what you have to.
The Nietzschean revolution in the morals of the elite is now devouring its own. Brett Kavanaugh appears to have led a rather decent life as public servant, husband, and father, though he, too, perhaps made his compromises in the pursuit of power. Yet his fellow Yalies, as pledged as any Balzac hero to “insatiable ambitions” and only too ready to make a pact with Vautrin, pursue him as mercilessly as hounds a hunted fox: they fail not only to show their fellow striver elementary decency but to give him the benefit of any doubt.
In their own minds they must justify their incivility as solicitude for those whom Kavanaugh might have hurt, or more candidly as an acquiescence in partisan pressures more intense than Elihu Root or Henry Stimson ever knew.
But that is bosh. Yale’s best and brightest are devouring their own because, like so many other leaders on both the Left and the Right today, they have been schooled in a realpolitik divorced from traditional constraints, one that seeks to win at any cost.
You do what you have to.
I believe Yale Law closed classes one day so the kids could go protest Justice Kavanaugh.
Let’s see the grade point averages of both Booker and Farrow. One is an affirmative action baby, the second the scion of two fabulous celebrities. Of course, Farrow has always been lauded as a genius but I notice he’s not working at MIT or NASA. Instead, he’s a sheet-sniffer who would do very well at the old Confidential Magazine.
Yale’s best and brightest are devouring their own... they have been schooled in a realpolitik divorced from traditional constraints, one that seeks to win at any cost.
* * *
Sounds like the policy of the traitorist National Review. Write for another publication.
Fabulous? most celebs are full of themselves and all that goes with it. Farrow is just next generation of it.
Excellent.
It is time to bring diversity to the Supreme Court and federal courts. Judges are drawn primarily from elitist Ivy League universities and near Ivy’s (Stanford, Duke). They are political creatures who float between government jobs, academia, and elite law firms before being appointed to the bench.
The president should seek out graduates of state university law schools. Look for good well respected lawyers in state courts, not just the federal bench. Even one or two corporate lawyers would add some diversity to the bench. Even a few non-lawyer constitutional law and government professors, who are strict originalists, would add value.
Court of Appeals Judge, Amy Barrett is a graduate of University of Notre Dame Law School.
She could break the Ivy monopoly should Ruth Ginsburg quit ( I hope so ).
Expect the pro-abortion lobby to scream their hearts out and fabricate fake stories about her if this happens.
RE: Sounds like the policy of the traitorist National Review. Write for another publication.
Well, it only took 4 posts to read an attack on NR. I guess, we’re making some progress :)
I’m using fabulous in its origin sense not in what it has come to mean. Farrow & Allen were celebrated for at least 30-40 years. Their son must have been a plume in Yale’s cap.
Great post, and the author is right.
But the *National Review* would have me believe that they’re now all populist and sincere..?
Ridiculous.
I really, really enjoyed cancelling my subsription.
I think I started reading them when I was 13.
Wow, that's a truly on-point description of what Ronan Farrow is. He peddles in celebrity scandals and increasingly with little evidence, just gossip.
Yale is a hedge-fund, that just happens to have a left-wing, social-justice training academy attached to it.
Each semester I tell my students that if I were ever fortunate enough to become President of the United States, the first decree I would make would be this: My administration would not contain anyone who graduated from college East of the Mississippi and North of the Mason-Dixon line. But I would certainly make an exception for Judge Amy Barrett.
Look how that's worked out over the years.
The graduates of these Yales and Harvards have screwed the country up so bad, it's time for graduates of the state universities across the country to try their hands at it.
You think a whole lot of DC insiders were not amused by social norms of elite DC prep schools and Yale becoming public fodder to influence this confirmation? Now the whole nation is wondering if ANYONE from those environments is a good candidate for confirmations, politics, or jobs.
New Jersey Lawyer Look Up
BOOKER, CORY A
Attorney ID 051291997
RETIRED 03/17/1998
He earned his Juris Doctor in 1997 from Yale Law School, where he operated free legal clinics for low-income residents of New Haven, Connecticut.
No record of a Connecticut License
Connecticut FAQ - If I am retired from the practice of law, do I have to register?
Yes. Attorneys can elect retirement status pursuant to Section 2-55 of the Connecticut Practice Book. Retirement does not constitute removal from the bar or the roll of attorneys. Retirement is not permanent and can be revoked at any time. Section 2-27 of the Connecticut Practice Book does not exempt retired attorneys from the registration requirement. There are no fees involved with the registration process, the only requirement is that you register annually, and notify the Statewide Grievance Committee of any changes pertinent to registration.
HMMMMMMMMMM, retired listed in NJ but not CT? Did he practice without a law license?
No record of a NY License
So was a lawyer for less than 1 year?
That's my takeaway from this mess. Real diversity....not finding minorities and females who have been indoctrinated in that incestuous environment.
I'd love to have a SC justice who commuted daily to college and law school and had to get up every morning to milk the cows (or whatever). President Trump wants to drain the swamp? Anyone who came from that elitist environment is already a swampthing!
Being a lawyer is HARD.
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