Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Edwin Meese III Center. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)
Posted on 08/23/2023 9:48:16 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
In almost every state, law students who pass their state bar examination, which allows them to practice law, take an oath to support the U.S. Constitution.
But the country's top law schools teach future lawyers and judges the opposite.
Many now teach that the U.S. Constitution, the supreme law of the nation since its ratification in 1788, is broken and should be scrapped.
At least that's what two members of conservative think tanks believe after reviewing courses at the country's Top 10 law schools, as ranked by U.S. News and World Report in 2022. They examined the teaching at Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Columbia universities and others.
Law professors at elite schools are open about their disdain for the U.S. Constitution, the researchers found.
"They're saying they want to get rid of the Constitution—they're making no secret about it," said J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. He's also worked for the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ).
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Edwin Meese III Center and former DOJ counsel, agreed.
The radicalization of law schools is a threat to freedom not previously encountered in the nation's history, Mr. von Spakovsky said.
"In fact, some of them are very direct in teaching kids that they need to be revolutionaries, according to these courses that these law school students are taking," he told The Epoch Times.
Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation's Edwin Meese III Center. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)
In 2022, Ryan D. Doerfler and Samuel Moyn—who teach law at Harvard and Yale universities, respectively—wrote a New York Times editorial titled "The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed."
In it, they wrote that the struggle over the Constitution has proven to be a dead end for liberals. They called the founding document "undemocratic" and "inadequate."
"The real need is not to reclaim the Constitution, as many would have it, but instead to reclaim America from constitutionalism," they wrote in the piece.
The writers reasoned that it would be far better if liberal legislators had the power to make a case for abortion and labor rights on their own merits without having "to bother with the Constitution."
That way of thinking has pushed law schools increasingly to the political left over the past decade, Mr. Adams said.
"The stuff they're teaching now is straight-up Marxist. There's a big difference from just 10 years ago."
Mr. von Spakovsky and Mr. Adams have been sounding the alarm about what's happening within the country's law schools through articles examining law school curricula.
Schools often teach that the Constitution is a tool of discrimination that must be uprooted, Mr. von Spakovsky said.
The idea that the Constitution and the United States are hopelessly flawed stems from critical race theory (CRT) and the concept of promoting social justice.
CRT has been spotlighted by works such as The 1619 Project by New York Times writers.
The 1619 Project, widely lauded by the political left, paints the United States as a country founded on slavery. It characterizes the nation's Founding Fathers as racists.
While The 1619 Project has been rejected by many academics, historians, and politicians, its teachings have been embraced vigorously by the left. Many have held it up as a model of how history should be taught to children and college students.
The ideology upholds that thinking that "our Constitution is a patriarchal, oppressive document used to suppress minorities and just about everyone else," Mr. von Spakovsky said. "And we are supposedly a systematically racist, misogynist society, and these law students need to go out and preach and practice revolution."
J. Christian Adams, president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation. (Courtesy of the Public Interest Legal Foundation)
The "Decentralized Resistance" class is about social change that results from "everyday resistance." Accumulating widespread and numerous acts of everyday resistance can precipitate "quasi-revolutionary" change, class instruction tells law students, Mr. Adams said.
"Law and Inequality" explores "inequality along lines of race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and class," he said.
This kind of classroom instruction has given rise to the far-left notion that prisons should be emptied because they're "racist," Mr. von Spakovsky said.
The popularization of these ideas also led to the election of George Soros-funded prosecutors in Democrat-run cities. Mr. Soros is a Hungarian-born businessman who has donated billions to left-wing causes.
Conservatives lament that Soros-friendly prosecutors care more about criminals than their victims and allow them to go unpunished while crime spirals out of control.
Left-wing ideology holds that laws wrongly target minorities more than white people. Proponents of that thinking say society needs to find a more equitable way of dealing with crime, such as using social workers to rehabilitate lawbreakers instead of putting them behind bars.
"What they want is lawyers and judges who simply decide cases brd on ideology, not on the law," Mr. von Spakovsky said.
"They literally equate words with violence," he said.
"So if you are expressing any kind of opinions that they disagree with, [they argue that] you don't have a First Amendment right to engage in that kind of speech because it suppresses minorities and others," he said.
Several classes at Stanford University demonstrated a shift away from the more routine courses on torts and contracts to classes with a more militant tone, Mr. von Spakovsky wrote in his articles.
Stanford law school offers "Violence, Resistance, and the Law," which teaches how the law "suppresses and invites resistance" and identifies the "subjects against whom legal violence is deployed."
"The State of Democratic Discourse" course at Stanford is "devoted to a candid discussion about the current state of public discourse, both nationally and in universities, focusing especially on misinformation and intimidation."
While he tried to deliver his speech, a mob of about 100 students heckled and shouted him down while faculty members did nothing. And some encouraged the students.
Judge Duncan asked for an administrator to address the hecklers.
Instead, Tirien Steinbach, Stanford Law School's associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion, took to the podium, scolding the conservative judge for the "harm" he inflicted with his rulings.
Students were angry at Judge Duncan because he refused in 2020 to allow a transgender inmate convicted of possessing child pornography to change his pronouns to female.
The judge had to be escorted from the law school by federal marshals.
Ms. Steinbach was put on administrative leave and resigned in July. But Stanford didn't punish students or other administrators and only required them to complete free speech training.
Austin Knudsen, Montana's attorney general, wrote a May 16 letter to Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice Mike McGrath addressing left-wing tactics in law schools.
Students are "far too comfortable using intimidation to silence opposing viewpoints," Mr. Knudsen wrote.
Activist students, he wrote, are "self-styled members of the progressive vanguard and justify their actions brd on the perceived evil of conservative legal views."
He warned that disruptions at elite law schools are everyone's problem, and "Montana can't bury its head in the sand and hope it goes away."
"We are at a turning point for the integrity of the legal profession," he wrote.
The behavior on campus will soon show up in the courts if there are no consequences for the student's actions, Knudsen warned.
It's important to take notice because graduates from elite law schools go on to influence government, courts, academia, and corporate America, he said.
The preaching of CRT, radical gender ideology, feminism, and climate change have been woven into much of the curriculum of Ivy League schools, such as Harvard Law, according to his review.
He noted a feminist offering at Harvard Law called the Bonobo Sisterhood , a one-credit course at Harvard Law. The class examined how people can learn about feminism from primates in a male-dominated society.
The course examines the "power and potential of female alliances to disrupt patriarchal systems."
The course description reads: "Through a legal, political, social, cultural, and economic lens, we ask what lessons the bonobos—our close primate relatives who share 98.7% of our DNA—offer humans for creating a society free of male sexual coercion."
The Institute for Social Research at Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, developed Marxist ideologies that came to be known as The Frankfurt School.
After being forced out of Germany by the Nazis, the institute's researchers relocated to Columbia University in New York in 1933 and developed critical theory.
That legacy now shows up in Columbia law classes, such as "Legal Methods II: Critical Race Methods: Practices, Prisms, and Problems."
The class description says the United States "suffers from many forms of discrimination," and the course will examine the "interface between legal interpretation, lawmaking practices, and racial hierarchy," Mr. von Spakovsky noted in his review.
The widespread social justice focus at top law schools suggests law firms would be better off hiring lawyers from state schools, he said.
But even there, "woke" ideology is rampant.
In a December 2022 Epoch Times story documenting CRT's effect on conservative college students, one law student at a Florida University confirmed that the Constitution was attacked in his law class.
The student, who wished to remain anonymous, recalled students arguing that the Constitution was illegitimate from the start and was written by racist, old, white men.
The professor didn't express that he condoned that point of view. But he didn't offer a rebuttal, either, the student said.
According to William Jacobson, a clinical law professor and director of the Securities Law Clinic at Cornell Law School, concepts such as CRT have long been taught in law schools.
Mr. Jacobson founded the Legal Insurrection website, which tracks CRT.
The increasing popularity of CRT in schools prompted him to start CritialRace.org in 2020, which maintains a databr of schools and colleges that teach or employ CRT-related policies.
He doesn't keep a databr on law schools that teach CRT because, traditionally, that's the only place it was taught, Mr. Jacobson said.
It wasn't until recently that the concepts began trickling down into K–12 classrooms and other college courses. That's where the concept became more controversial, he said.
The problem started when CRT evolved into anti-racism training.
It sounds innocuous. But the theory is to prescribe racism against whites and others of "privilege" in the name of retribution for racism against minorities in the past, present, and future.
"At the law school level, it's not going to bring down America," he said.
But it can certainly "poison the well," Mr. Jacobson said, by dividing people brd on race or gender into oppressors or victims.
And OBTW, since the Constitution CREATED the U.S. Federal Government and the United States of America, ditching it would immediately render the feds an unauthorized entity and we’d be back to individual states with no legitimate government uniting or protecting them -
- no valid federal government and no United States of America.
Other than that, it’s a great idea.
And socialist-leaning judges who have allowed the federal government to grow to huge, unchecked proportions while whittling away at our rights.
Examples:
The general welfare clause has been used to seize money from some people and give it to others.
The interstate commerce clause has been used to give the federal government practically unlimited power to regulate any item that might tangentially affect commerce between the states.
The Constitution gives Congress specific items on which the treasury may spend. Now, there are trillions of dollars spent on practically anything that Congress and the president desire.
When the Constitution was ratified, it was understood that any action not specifically allowed was prohibited. That has been completely reversed and now anything not specifically prohibited is allowed. And even that has as many exceptions as legislators and liberal judges can get away with. e.g Shall not be infringed.
Did not a lot of these people take an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution? For those who did, are they not guilty of perjury?
My memory may be faulty, but if I remember correctly, when Kagan was Dean of Harvard Law School, she headed up a periodic review panel examining the required curriculum to graduate from that institution.
A mandated course on the US Constitution was under consideration but she advocated that it still be offered but not made a requirement for a degree. She preferred a mandated course on international law instead.
Commies gonna commie. From the beginning we were told “A Republic, if we can keep it” and that it was written for a moral people.
Looking more and more like the tree of Liberty is going to have to be watered.
These are the fuure lawyers and judges. If Democrats “win” the next two presidential elections, that will probably be enough to finish America for good. Finished, as Reagan (and Franklin) warned us.
We need an American Pinochet.
L
Yes. The Constitution puts the brakes on radical change that can destroy our nation. That's why change takes many, many years to take place. Do away with the Constitution and we will have anarchy over a short period of time. Slow changes are beneficial; that is why we can survive the 4 (or 8) years of a bad presidential regime such as Obama or Biden. Calls for radical change are blocked in the courts due to the Constitution, and that is a good thing.
This is the official announcement for something that happened a long time ago.
Anyone who wants Marxism can move to China or North Korea!
My thoughts exactly. Every single citizen of this country who advocates for, supports or promotes Marxism and its variants should be given a free helicopter ride!
🚁
🤸🏻
It’s funny, this they don’t call subversion or trying to overthrow the government.
They want the Bill of Rights gone so they can disarm us and shut us up. Without the BOR, they will run roughshod over us. Of this there is zero doubt. I will not comply.
When I was in graduate school at Harvard (in science), I audited a course in Constitutional Law.
It was given by one of Harvard Law School’s great Constitutional Law scholars, who had been a candidate for the Supreme Court.
The course mainly covered the great Constitutional Law cases, which had been decided by the Supreme Court, from Marbury vs. Madison to the 20th century.
Harvard Law School has a great tradition of teaching and research on Constitutional Law, and of producing constitutional lawyers and judges.
It is a great shame to ruin that tradition!!!!
Understand completely. I went to Stanford.
And the fugly biotch got suspended. and then she resigned. That's the problem with these listcicle articles that simply line up outrage after outrage. Justice was done here...
And to that point, if any law student actually adopts or integrates (lol) any of that CRT nonsense, they will either have to be one of a very select minority (lol) that finds a judgeship or a prosecutorial role, OR be condemned to legal aid work while paying enormous student loans.
Because those types of 'lawyers' come with a checkbox on their foreheads: do. not. hire.
With all due respect to freeper parents, please consider the following.
The main problem with the Constitution (imo) is that parents have evidently not been making sure that their children are being taught about the federal government's constitutionally limited powers as the drafters of the Constitution had intended for those powers to be understood.
Otherwise, children would explain to parents that the thing to do with the "broken" Constitution in the context of unconstitutionally federal federal government is to appropriately amend it.
Instead, when children become voters they abuse their voting power by reelecting career federal senators who exploit constitutionally low-information voters by promising voters unconstitutional federal spending programs, programs based on stolen state powers and likewise stolen state revenues, in order to stay in power .
In fact, an excellent new amendment would be to repeal ASAP the 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments, such an amendment a peaceful way to put corrupt Congress back into its constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited power cage.
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
That being said about fixing the broken Constitution, Democratic and Republican Trump-supporting patriots need to get ready ASAP to support hopeful Trump 47 by primarying ALL state and federal, lawmakers and executives, except for MTG, Gaetz (and others?), for the 2024 primaries.
After all, lawmakers and executives continue to show that they do not have the patriotism and leadership skills necessary to find legislative support for effective remedies for unconstitutional government policies.
Exclusive: Marjorie Taylor Greene ‘Dumbfounded’ GOP Colleagues Will Not Call for Biden’s Impeachment! (6.10.23)
In fact, consider that, since one of the very few powers that the states have expressly constitutionally given to the big, bad federal government to dictate peacetime domestic policy is to run the US Mail Service (most federal domestic policy actually based on stolen state powers imo), the worst problem that the country would otherwise be looking at with a new Congress of Trump-supporting freshman lawmakers is arguably a delay with mail delivery.
"Article I, Section 8, Clause 7: To establish Post Offices and post Roads;"
"From the accepted doctrine that the United States is a government of delegated powers, it follows that those not expressly granted, or reasonably to be implied from such as are conferred, are reserved to the states, or to the people. To forestall any suggestion to the contrary, the Tenth Amendment was adopted. The same proposition, otherwise stated, is that powers not granted are prohibited [emphasis added]." —United States v. Butler, 1936.
Trump can endorse candidates from lists that patriots who respect the federal government's constitutionally limited powers provide for him, as long as candidates are not incumbents, candidates also promising to repeal the 16th (direct taxes) and 17th (popular voting for federal senators) Amendments after they win office.
The definition of insanity is reelecting your beloved career state and federal lawmakers and executives over and over again, expecting those same politicians to find remedies for unconstitutional government policies every time.
Patriots, let's not allow ourselves to be fooled for third time in 2024 by the corrupt, constitutionally undefined political parties that have pirated control of state and federal governments.
The Founders were absolutely brilliant. They provided a constitutional method to amend the Constitution. But the Left does not want to proceed in a legal manner.
Great post, A10.
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