Free Republic

It is worrisome that “progressive” activism has managed to infiltrate so much of American higher education, but wildly politicized sociology and English departments can do us only marginal damage. Few students are interested in the ravings of those professors, and almost no one is influenced by their writings. On the other hand, the leftist capture of our law schools is a very serious matter. How we educate future lawyers and judges affects society as a whole. The corruption of our legal system is not a minor illness we can shake off; it’s a life-threatening disease. In his new book Lawless:...

Helyeh Doutaghi, deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, placed on “immediate administrative leave” as university investigates allegations.. A research scholar at Yale Law School also moonlights as a member of a U.S.-sanctioned terrorist fundraising entity, according to web postings reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Those postings reveal that Helyeh Doutaghi, the deputy director of Yale Law School’s Law and Political Economy Project, is a member of Samidoun, an organization sanctioned by the U.S. government in October in an announcement that described it as a "sham charity" and a "front organization" for the Popular Front...

Most industries and occupations have trade associations to promote their interests through lobbying, marketing, and public relations. Lawyers are no exception. One difference between, say, the American Urological Association and the American Bar Association, however, is that instead of merely providing opportunities for professional networking and vacation junkets dressed up as “conventions,” the left-leaning ABA is clothed with quasi-governmental regulatory authority over the entire field of legal education. The ABA effectively oversees the operations of nearly 200 law schools in the United States. Absurdly, this professional cartel regulates itself! The U.S. Department of Education limits eligibility for federal student loans...

Law school deans from over 100 higher learning institutions across the country signed a letter calling on students to disagree with people respectfully, while upholding the rule of law and championing the U.S. Constitution. The American Bar Association’s (ABA) Task Force for American Democracy unveiled the letter, which was signed by 119 deans, including Kerry Abrams of the Duke University School of Law; Paul Brest of Stanford Law School; Jennifer Gerarda Brown of Quinnipiac University; Jens David Ohlin of Cornell Law School; Heather K. Gerken of Yale School of Law; Risa Goluboff of the University of Virginia School of Law;...

The student editors of the Columbia Law Review issued a statement on Wednesday urging Columbia Law School to cancel exams in the wake of the police operation that cleared the university’s unauthorized encampment, saying the "violence" had left them "irrevocably shaken" and "unable to focus." The statement, which represents the majority opinion of the editorial board and was endorsed by five other law journals, including the Columbia Human Rights Law Review & A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, accused the police of "brutalizing" students—though no major injuries have been reported—and claimed that canceling exams was a "proportionate response" to the "distress our...

Higher education did not have a good year in 2023, as evidenced by high-profile resignations at Penn (Liz Magill) and Harvard (Claudine Gay). This followed abysmal televised congressional testimony in which the two Ivy League presidents and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth refused to condemn campus calls for genocide against Jews. Harvard’s disgrace was compounded by revelations of serial plagiarism on the part of Gay. The legal academy has fared no better in recent years, with highly publicized incidents of intolerance, de facto censorship, and speech suppression at Stanford Law (e.g., students heckling Fifth Circuit judge Kyle Duncan), Yale Law (e.g., disruption...

New York University's Law School Bar Association president stated that Hamas' slaughter of children in Israel was 'necessary,' in an email send to members of the university community. Ryna Workman, 24, a non-binary student at NYU's School of Law sent a weekly newsletter saying the murder of innocent Israeli children, women, and citizens this past week was is Israel's 'full responsibility.' Workman, from Simpsonville, South Carolina, also refused to condemn Hamas - an internationally-recognized terrorist group who have triggered the all-out war. New York University told DailyMail.com that Workman's statement 'does not in any way reflect the point of view...

Observers of the American collegiate scene are likely well aware of the academic jihad against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax and the disgraceful shouting down of federal judge Kyle Duncan at Stanford, led by a woke DEI apparatchik. But in terms of outrageous violations of American norms of academic conduct, due process, and civility, nothing compares with the treatment of Professor Scott Gerber of Ohio Northern University (ONU). Unlike elite coastal schools like Penn or Stanford, ONU is a Midwestern private school of so-so reputation, not on lists of the 10 best colleges in Ohio, much less the...

The Supreme Court’s decision to prohibit affirmative action has the racists who run our university in a pickle.They want to discriminate based on race, but they are legally limited by the decision in the ways that they can pretend not to be.Columbia University Law School came up with a clever plan: ask students to send in a video of them talking for no more than 90 seconds. Ostensibly the goal was to show how the student comes across. What are they like?Except, well, 90 seconds. Not exactly a lot of personal data can be gleaned from 90 seconds of a...

You probably don’t realize it, but over 150 years after the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, we still have “Badges and Incidents of Slavery” in our country, and we need a “Radical Vision for a Third Reconstruction.” At least, that is what you would be learning as a gullible student at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, according to a conference held there on Feb. 17 entitled “The Unfinished Work of Abolition.” That was one of the first things we found in our review of UPenn Law, which is next in the series that J. Christian Adams...

Pro-Israel groups and Jewish allies are calling for the City University of New York's (CUNY) public law school to lose its funding after a graduating student accused Israel of "indiscriminately raining bullets and bombs" on Palestinians during her commencement speech. She also claimed laws are "white supremacy" and attacked the "fascist" NYPD and U.S. military. Fatima Mousa Mohammed, who was selected by the 2023 class to speak at the May 12 CUNY Law ceremony, accused Israel of "indiscriminately" murdering Palestinians and encouraging "lynch mobs." She also celebrated resistance to "Zionism around the world" while lauding the school's support of the...

The Chronicle of Higher Education, a politically partisan higher education publication and lobby platform headquartered in Washington, D.C., recently sought to report on how law school rankings may have changed, due to a handful of progressive institutions led by Yale, Harvard, and Berkeley, that protested the U.S. News & World Report rankings methodology: the law schools claimed that these rankings undermined minorities by overemphasizing the schools’ elitist status, and thereby alienated many students from applying. The Chronicle tried to spin the new rankings as reflecting some improved outcome.It should be pretty obvious, however, that there is nothing new about the...

It’s not clear exactly why these CUNY Law School grads decided to turn their backs on Mayor Adams but if I had to guess it was probably his reluctance to call the death of a Jordan Neely a murder and instead suggest people should wait for the results of an investigation. But the way it came across today was a bunch of leftists booing him for having once been a police officer.As the City University of New York School of Law dean, Sudha Setty, introduced the mayor on Friday, she noted his time spent on the police force. The crowd...

Recently, I argued in a Martin Center article that the fourth year of study for the bachelor’s degree is probably relatively unproductive and that enormous resources could be saved by introducing three-year degree programs like those found in Europe. What works at Oxford should also work at, say, Appalachian State University. Yet I told only half the story: Many students go on to get graduate or professional degrees. Does the Law of Diminishing Returns apply to these programs, as well? Yes. Universities offer such programs at least in part to collect tuition revenues and to allow faculty to teach the...

If you thought based on our coverage of the curriculums at Yale, Stanford, and Chicago that you had seen the worst of the political indoctrination that passes for a law school education these days, wait until you see the curriculum at the Colombia Law School in New York City. Parents are paying $331,350 — or students are going into enormous debt — for what amounts to a three-year reeducation camp at Columbia to produce leftist social warriors who will, as Christian says, “upend centuries of legal traditions and institutions,” including trashing the U.S. Constitution, to usher in the Marxist,...

A Stanford dean has been placed on administrative leave after she participated in interrupting a prominent guest speaker and lectured him on progressive gender ideology in front of the audience that came to see him.Recently at Stanford University Law School, Kyle Duncan, a Trump-appointed federal judge, was fulfilling an invitation from the school’s Federalist Society when a group of student protesters interrupted his speech, shouting over him and refusing to let him continue. They claimed Duncan was transphobic and homophobic, based on past decisions in which he refused to grant transgender status to convicted male sex offenders.Duncan was appointed by...

Elite law schools have become training academies not so much for effective and competent lawyers, but instead for militant transformational radicals with a law degree. Mainstream consumers of legal services, otherwise known as paying clients, would be shocked by the evolution that has taken place in the nation’s elite law schools. Instead of producing lawyers capable of helping clients, these schools now turn out leftist activists who are most competent at using transformational designs to upend centuries of legal traditions and institutions, including, ultimately, the U.S. Constitution itself. This problem isn’t new. But the shocking behavior at Stanford by rude,...

Eighteen years ago, I published an article in the Stanford Law Review which documented for the first time the enormous breadth and scale of race-based admissions preferences in law schools. At most law schools, the undergraduate grades (UGPA) and median LSAT scores of enrolled Black students were two standard deviations below those of white students at the same school. Outside of a handful of “Historically Black” institutions (where racial preferences were minimal), Blacks in law school were not faring well. They were failing out of school at more than twice the white rate; half of those who did graduate had...

In late 2023, a new book on law and legal education is coming out (Legally Blind). In the book, I explain how ideology is affecting legal theory, teaching, and the larger law industry, including its entrenched ways of doing business. This all starts with the law schools, and fixing the problem will involve reconsidering how such institutions are categorized and ranked. At present, law-school rankings function mostly as sales and branding mechanisms rather than providing an actual managerial report that reflects institutional performance. They speak very little, if at all, to the way a school is run operationally and its...

The American Bar Association is under fire after taking steps to abandon LSAT entrance exam scores as a law school admissions requirement after a study showed that minority applicants score lower. The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved the proposed standards revision earlier this month.The proposed change now goes to the association's policy-making body, the House of Delegates, for review in February. "But final approval to change ABA Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools rests with the council, which serves as an independent arm of the ABA for...